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The traditional approach to academic research goes something like this: Assemble experts from a discipline, put them in a building, and hope something useful emerges. Biology departments do biology. Engineering departments do engineering. Medical schools treat patients.
NYU is turning that model inside out. At its new Institute for Engineering Health, the organizing principle centers around disease states rather than traditional disciplines. Instead of asking “what can electrical engineers contribute to medicine?,” they’re asking “what would it take to cure allergic asthma?,” and then assembling whoever can answer that question, whether they’re immunologists, computational biologists, materials scientists, AI researchers, or wireless communications engineers.
Jeffrey Hubbell, NYU’s vice president for bioengineering strategy and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. New York University
The early results suggest they’re onto something. A chemical engineer and an electrical engineer collaborated to build a device that detects airborne threats — including disease pathogens — that’s now a startup. A visually impaired physician teamed with mechanical engineers to create navigation technology for blind subway riders. And Jeffrey Hubbell, the Institute’s leader, is advancing “inverse vaccines” that could reprogram immune systems to treat conditions from celiac disease to allergies — work that requires equal fluency in immunology, molecular engineering, and materials science.
The underlying problem these collaborations address is conceptual as much as organizational. In his field, Hubbell argues that modern medicine has optimized around a single strategy: developing drugs that block specific molecules or suppress targeted immune responses. Antibody technology has been the workhorse of this approach. “It’s really fit for purpose for blocking one thing at a time,” he says. The pharmaceutical industry has become extraordinarily good at creating these inhibitors, each designed to shut down a particular pathway.
But Hubbell asks a different question: Rather than inhibit one bad thing at a time, what if you could promote one good thing and generate a cascade that contravenes several bad pathways simultaneously? In inflammation, could you bias the system toward immunological tolerance instead of blocking inflammatory molecules one by one? In cancer, could you drive pro-inflammatory pathways in the tumor microenvironment that would overcome multiple immune-suppressive features at once?
This shift from inhibition to activation requires a fundamentally different toolkit — and a different kind of researcher. “We’re using biological molecules like proteins, or material-based structures — soluble polymers, supramolecular structures of nanomaterials — to drive these more fundamental features,” Hubbell explains. You can’t develop those approaches if you only understand biology, or only understand materials science, or only understand immunology. You need an understanding and a mastery of all three.
“There will be people doing AI, data science, computational science theory, people doing immunoengineering and other biological engineering, people doing materials science and quantum engineering, all really in close proximity to each other.” —Jeffrey Hubbell, NYU Tandon
Which logically leads to the question: How do you create researchers with that kind of cross-disciplinary depth?
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