Medicon Valley Alliance EXECUTIVE CLUB DINNER WITH Kasper Lage

Kasper Lage is the managing director of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Genomic Mechanisms of Disease at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a center he played a key role in conceiving and launching. Lage is a Danish national who has been part of the Broad, Harvard, and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) communities for the last 14 years, during which he transitioned from a postdoctoral fellow into senior leadership and faculty roles in genomic medicine. Lage is also a member of the leadership group of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad. He is the director of bioinformatics at the Department of Surgery at MGH, and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and MGH.

His lab uses the newest technologies in gene editing, single-cell genomics, stem cell modeling, and machine learning to generate and functionally interpret disease-relevant genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomics datasets. His group seeks to identify new genes and molecular networks driving the development of different diseases — including cancers, cardiometabolic disorders, and neuropsychiatric disorders — and to use these insights to lay the groundwork for rationally designed medicines. He has served in leadership roles in several international National Institutes of Health consortia such as the Convergent Neuroscience Consortium and the Accelerating Medicines Partnership.

Lage has consulted for and collaborated extensively with, major pharma, tech, and biotech companies in Boston such as Merck & Co., Takeda, Pfizer, Google, and others. Recently, he chaired the Genetics and Analytics Advisory Panel of Biogen. He has served on the Research Computation Oversight Committee of Mass General Brigham, which defines the vision for research computation across MGH and other major teaching hospitals for Harvard Medical School. Before joining the Harvard and MGH faculty in 2012, Lage was director of business development at Orphazyme, a Danish translational genetics company focused on innovative treatments for lysosomal storage diseases. Based on technologies from his Ph.D., he co-founded Copenhagen-based Intomics, a contract research organization that specializes in using cutting-edge machine learning approaches to derive core insights from biomedical big data.

Lage is a two-time co-recipient of the Martin Research Prize for Excellence in Clinical Research from the Executive Committee of Research at MGH. He also received the Novo Scholarship in Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Sciences, the Shore Fellowship from Harvard Medical School, and a Sloan Leadership Fellowship from MIT.

Lage earned his M.Sc. in Health Sciences from the University of Copenhagen and a Ph.D. in bioinformatics and systems biology of human diseases from the Technical University of Denmark. Later, he served as a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, MGH, and the Broad Institute, and earned an M.B.A. from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.