Giovanni Traverso and L4TE, the "nest" of future medicine

Every Monday morning, more than a hundred people meet with John Traverso In a classroom at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. There's food for everyone, an hour of socializing, and then it begins. Mechanical engineers, biologists, veterinarians, doctors. Each brings their own piece. A stem cell expert comments on a mechanical engineering project. An electrical engineer notices a flaw in a drug delivery system. They're all there for the same reason: to invent new ways to deliver medicines into the human body.

Welcome to LT4E in Laboratory for Translational Engineering, a place where pills turn into stars that stay in your stomach for a week, and where capsules are inspired by squid to inject drugs without needles. Have I confused you enough? Forgive me: I'll clarify. Starting with Giovanni Traverso, whom I mentioned at the beginning. Who is he?

The doctor who didn't stop to cure

Giovanni Traverso is 49 years old. He was born in Cambridge, England, but grew up in Peru, then Canada, and then back in England. His father was Peruvian with Italian roots, his mother Nicaraguan. When he was 14, his family moved to Toronto, Canada, to escape the political turmoil in Peru. In high school, having finished his required courses early, he followed the advice of a chemistry teacher and enrolled in a program that took him to a genetics lab at the University of Toronto. Toronto Hospital for Sick Children.

There he spends his afternoons mapping chromosome 7 and learning molecular biology techniques such as PCR. It's the pioneering period of genomics, and Traverso falls in love with the scientific process: ask a question, design an experiment, find an answer.

He decides to study medicine at Cambridge, but in his second year he does a summer internship in the cancerologist's laboratory Bert Vogelstein to the Johns Hopkins UniversityThe work fascinated him so much that Vogelstein asked him to stay for a doctorate. Traverso accepted, put medicine on hold, and moved to Baltimore. During his PhD, he developed a method for identifying colon cancer mutations in stool samples. a technology later licensed by Exact Sciences and is now used in the Cologuard test. In 2003, for that work, it ended up in the TR35 list of MIT, that of the 35 most promising innovators under 35 in the world.

After his doctorate, he returned to Cambridge to complete medical school, then completed three years of clinical practice in the UK. But it wasn't enough. In 2007 begins a residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital of Boston and, at the same time, knocks on the door of Robert Langer, a professor at MIT and a pioneer of materials engineering applied to medicine. Traverso has no background in chemical engineering, but he sees the value of combining clinical insight with materials science. Langer welcomes him as a postdoc. From that moment on, Traverso never stopped moving on two parallel tracks.: doctor who visits patients, engineer who invents devices.

A laboratory that works like a startup (but is an academy)

Today John Traverso is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, associate member of the Broad Institute. And directs, as mentioned, the Laboratory for Translational Engineering (L4TE), a group of over 100 people spread across MIT, the Brigham, Broad Institute, the Koch Institute, and The Engine, MIT's cutting-edge technology incubator. The lab is structured around specialized "themes": manufacturing, bioanalytics, and in vivo testing with dedicated teams and in-house veterinarians. A researcher can move from biological formulation to mechanical design without ever leaving the laboratory ecosystem.If he needs to test a prototype on animals, the veterinarian is there. If he needs to figure out how to get FDA approval, there's someone to help him. All in the same collaborative space.

This setup eliminates months of waiting between separate teams. In many academic labs, initial discoveries are developed into prototypes and then passed on to other groups (sometimes in industry, sometimes in clinical settings) for advanced testing and commercialization. In Giovanni Traverso's lab, these steps are compressed into a single continuous flowInvention, prototyping, testing, iteration, and clinical feedback occur as the work of a single interdisciplinary team. Engineers sit side by side with physicians, material scientists with microbiologists.

On any given day, a researcher might start the morning discussing an animal study with a veterinarian, spend the afternoon refining a mechanical design, and end the evening meeting with a regulatory expert.

Squid-inspired capsules and star-shaped pills

Giovanni Traverso's group has developed a series of technologies that sound almost fantastic, yet are already in the advanced clinical phase. The star-shaped capsule, for example. It is swallowed like a normal pill, reaches the stomach and opens into a star-shaped structure that anchors it to the gastric tissue.It releases drugs gradually over days or weeks, then dissolves and is excreted naturally. A version of this technology, loaded with risperidone for the treatment of schizophrenia, has completed Phase 3 clinical trials with positive results. The first long-acting oral therapy for this pathology.

Then, there is the capsule inspired by cephalopods. Squid and octopuses move by filling their mantle cavity with water and then rapidly expelling it through the siphon. Traverso and his team used the same principle to create a capsule that shoots jets of drug directly into the wall of the digestive tract. No needles. Just controlled pressure. The capsule passes through the stomach intact, dissolves in the intestine and releases the drug using compressed carbon dioxide or coiled springs to generate the necessary thrust.In animal tests, this technology administered insulin and GLP-1 receptor agonists with the same effectiveness as subcutaneous injections. The system could also work for RNA therapies, vaccines, and treatments for obesity and diabetes.

Another invention of the lab is a capsule that stays in the stomach for months and continuously monitors the internal temperatureEvery time a person eats or drinks, their temperature changes slightly. By measuring these micro changes, the capsule records eating patterns with a precision impossible with external devices or self-reporting.. James McRae, who developed this technology during his PhD with Traverso, says it could offer new insights into how drugs like Ozempic and other GLP-1 therapies modify eating behavior. From day one of the project, McRae engaged with outside companies and regulatory consultants to prepare for future human trials.

Eleven startups and an obsession with patients

John Traverso he co-founded no less than 11 biotech startups to bring his inventions out of the lab. Some address global health challenges, such as developing more sustainable personal protective equipment for healthcare workers. Others focus on chronic conditions that require constant doses: HIV, schizophrenia, diabetes.

Lyndra Therapeutics, founded in 2015 with Robert Langer and others, has raised over $305 million and is conducting clinical trials of its weekly pill for schizophrenia. Bio Sound works on technologies for ultra-rapid delivery of therapies in the gastrointestinal tract. Celero Systems develops an ingestible device to detect opioid overdoses. Vivtex deals with oral drug delivery systems. Syntis Bio, founded in 2022, is working on an oral polymer that coats the stomach and other organs, altering how drugs are absorbed or which hormones are activated.

But Traverso doesn't think of these companies as academic spinoffs. He sees them as natural extensions of his lab's work. "What we do is a continuum," he says. Projects are like children: they are born, they are nurtured, and finally they are sent out into the world to grow and help people.. Matt Murphy, a mechanical engineer who manages one of the lab's main fabrication spaces, says he's gained "PhD-level experience working here for four years." He's now preparing to launch a startup with one of Traverso's postdocs.

Fail well, fail fast, move on

Traverso's philosophy is simple: fail well, fail fast, move on. "Most of the things I've worked on have failed," he says. "But it depends on how you define failure." Even if a hypothesis doesn't work as expected, the process itself has value.. This is why he encourages students and postdocs to tackle large, uncertain problems, knowing that a dead end isn't the end of a career but merely an opportunity to better navigate the next challenge.

James McRae He recalls a time when a major program, two or three years in the making, suddenly changed direction after the sponsor shifted priorities. The team was preparing a device for human safety testing, and suddenly that goal was no longer there. Instead of shelving everything, Traverso pushed the group to "be a little more creative again" and explore new directions. That shift sparked McRae's work on an autonomous drug delivery system: the patient swallows two capsules that interact in the stomach. When one sensor capsule detects an anomalous signal, it instructs a second capsule to release a drug.

“He often says he has a focus on not wasting time,” she says. Kimberley Biggs, a postdoc in the lab. “Time is something you can't buy back. Time is something you can't save and save for later.” When things don't work, Traverso asks his students to be sure why they didn't work. Is it biology? Materials science? Mechanics? He's obsessed with improvement.

Biggs is working on a project funded by the Gates FoundationStabilizing therapeutic bacteria for neonatal and women's health so they remain effective without refrigeration. A biochemist by training, she had never worked on devices before joining the lab, but she collaborated closely with the mechanical fabrication team to integrate her bacterial therapy (for conditions such as bacterial vaginosis and recurrent urinary tract infections) into an intravaginal ring that releases it over time.

Giovanni Traverso, or: the measure of success is not complexity: it's effectiveness

Traverso still maintains a clinical practice at Brigham and Women's Hospital, participating in the gastroenterology consultation service for several weeks a year. Staying connected with patients keeps issues concrete and helps decide which puzzles to tackle in the lab.

"There are many puzzles ahead of us, and I gravitate toward areas that have a solution that will help people in the short term," he says. For Traverso, the measure of success is not the complexity of the engineering but the effectiveness of the outcome. The goal is always therapy that works for people who need it, wherever they are..

In his courses at MIT, as Translational EngineeringGiovanni Traverso invites experts from the FDA, hospitals, and startups to discuss the challenges of bringing medical technology to the world. “He shared his network with us,” says Murphy, who took the course while working in the lab. “Now that I'm trying to launch a startup, I can reach out to these people.” The lab culture is so collaborative that everyone wants to teach everyone else. “If you encounter a challenge in an area where you have limited knowledge, chances are someone else in the lab has that background and will be happy to help.”

“I'd say most of the things I've been involved in have failed,” Traverso repeats. “But I think it depends on how you define failure.” Failure is not the end, it's just information.

And at the Laboratory for Translational Engineering, the cornerstone of the future is already in place: information is the currency that matters most.