TWIST talk by Shuguang Zhang (MIT)
Channel: ISTAustria
Date: 23/06/2017

On June 20, 2017, MIT researcher Shuguang Zhang gave his TWIST talk "Growing a business, from the lab" at IST Austria. His nanofiber-scaffold technology became the foundation for a biotech company. In the early 1990s, Shuguang Zhang, then an MIT postdoc, stumbled upon peptides that could self-assemble into nanostructures, creating three-dimensional environments for cell culturing. It was, at the time, a breakthrough discovery. One decade later, in a last-ditch effort to bring this discovery to the public, these peptides would find commercial application through 3-D Matrix, a startup co-founded by Shuguang and other MIT scientists. Today, 3-D Matrix has a market value of roughly $1 billion. It's also a top biotech firm in Japan, where its new headquarters are located, and has the most-traded stock on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Shuguang's lab at MIT today focuses on developing new classes of biological materials using natural amino acids through molecular self-assembly.