Throughout its 150th anniversary year, GSAS is foregrounding the voices of some of its most remarkable alumni and students as they speak about their work, its impact, and their experiences at the School.

JB Michel is the founder of Patch Biosciences, a company that seeks “to engineer gene therapies that are safer, more effective, and able to address a broader range of diseases.” He talks about the personal story behind his interest in genetic medicine, his company’s approach to it, and how the support he found at GSAS inspired him to take on big challenges.

Personal Medicine

I work on genetic medicine because my nephews were diagnosed with muscular dystrophy (MD). There’s no cure for it.

Drug discovery is an expert-driven industry, heavily reliant on deep insights gleaned from spending many years understanding one topic. (Think Nobel laureates.) It does not scale well in the way software engineering does, which is a problem given how many diseases remain incurable, like MD.

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