Spotlight On: Dario Altieri, President & CEO, The Wistar Institute
May 2025 — The Philadelphia region is among the best places for the life sciences sector in the country, given the “quality and the number of academic institutions that do exceptional research, with spin-out companies from academic institutions and companies relocating from other sites to be close to the innovation that is nurtured by our academic entities,” said Dr. Dario Altieri, president and CEO of The Wistar Institute. In an interview with Invest, Altieri discussed challenges for the sector and how The Wistar Institute is helping bridge gaps between research and market-ready innovations.
What have been the most significant milestones for Wistar in the last 12 to 18 months?
The past year has been truly transformational and builds upon long-term sustainable finances, faculty growth, and support from Wistar’s Board of Trustees. We launched what is now the largest facility expansion of Wistar, which has a more than 130-year history. Wistar is a research institution. We don’t give degrees, and we don’t see patients.
The expansion has taken on two different forms. One is that we significantly expanded our research enterprise through repurposing and renovating the existing footprint. And then for the first time in our history, we expanded beyond our walls and leased 25,000 square feet of a new research floor at 3675 Market Street.
The second component of our expansion is the creation of two new Centers. The science happening at Wistar is organized around Centers that are hubs for collaboration, integration, and faculty development. We started with the Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center and the Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center, and with this expansion, we’ve added two new centers: the Center for Advanced Therapeutics and the HIV Cure and Viral Diseases Center. The new facility expansion is intended to be the home for these new Centers, which will be linked to significant staff and faculty recruitment. This last year has been a big deal for us.
What are some of the most pressing challenges and opportunities shaping the life sciences industry in the region?
Our mission is biomedical research, supporting discovery science and medical breakthroughs. Everything at Wistar is disease-related. The challenge is to continue to be an engine for innovation and remain true to our core values of high-risk, high-reward research. These are areas that could advance by leaps and bounds our knowledge about diseases and point toward potential new therapies. This was the spirit behind the creation of our new Center for Advanced Therapeutics.
We want to bring together the best scientific talent, driven by the freedom to discover, and provided with the necessary infrastructure and state-of-the-art equipment to start thinking about disease pathways, their vulnerabilities, and how to advance promising agents to the clinic with our collaborators. This is all predicated on cooperation, synergy, and interaction.
What is the role of public-private partnerships and how can they help evolve the life sciences sector?
Public-private partnerships are key, and they have been a kind of trademark of the Institute. I think we are one of the only organizations in town to have formal codified agreements with all the other academic institutions in Philadelphia and with many entities in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry. We believe that a reformed or updated version of the public-private partnership is the engine that could drive further innovation in biometric research.
We return to the concept of ‘What The Wistar Institute can contribute’. We’re a single-mission organization. Research is the only thing that we do. We don’t pretend to cover the waterfront of doing other things, like higher education, patient care, or community service. There are wonderful organizations that do those things. We don’t.
We come to the table with the idea of trying to bring together as many potential collaborators as we can around the idea of innovative discoveries in biomedical research. We also leverage public-private partnerships for workforce development, which is a very important pillar at Wistar – creating a stable talent pipeline of people who want to be here, who want to stay in this region, and create a career for themselves in the life sciences.
How is Wistar bridging that gap between research and market-ready innovations?
We hope the creation of the new Center for Advanced Therapeutics will do just that. First, we need to determine whether we have the pieces in place to bridge that gap, from bench-to-bedside, which is generally called the “valley of death”. There is a lot of basic research that gets done, but very few assets can go all the way to clinical testing and eventually to market. And there are a lot fewer resources to do that.
Again, we first must make sure that we have the pieces in place. That means the human talent and the brilliant scientists who are committed not just to understanding a pathway that is important in diseases, but to finding and elucidating what vulnerabilities that pathway might have that could be targetable, could be therapeutically addressed.
The second piece is technology. The science of today is technologically complex, and there have been leaps and bounds in terms of how new approaches can accelerate the path of discovery.
We have also created an internal accelerator funding mechanism that we hope to deploy to bridge that gap and create enough funding to cover all the testing that is necessary for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve, not just a drug, but to approve the clinical testing of a potential agent.
What makes Philadelphia a great place for life sciences to continue to thrive and grow?
Philadelphia has a lot of the pieces in place. I would say that one of the most important assets that the region has is the quality and the number of academic institutions that do exceptional research. We go back to the idea that the partnership between academic institutions and the federal government is the key to success. Philadelphia has done that very well as we have several premier academic organizations that do research, and outstanding patient care that attracts great talent from other regions.
The second piece is that there has always been a culture of pioneering, of innovation in Philadelphia. We have seen it with the explosion of cell and gene therapy over the last several years. There were many other regions that contributed, but honestly, this area contributed the most advances in terms of bringing exceptionally novel treatments all the way to the clinic and eventually to market.
The third important asset that the region has is a thriving biotechnology industry, with spin-out companies from academic institutions and companies relocating from other sites (to be close) to the innovation that is nurtured by our academic entities. That has been a very important asset to enrich the ecosystem and continue to create those opportunities.
What are the top priorities for the institute over the next two to three years?
We hope the two new Centers, the expansion of the Institute in terms of its physical footprint, and the opportunities that will be created by pursuing research in those areas will act as a multiplier. A multiplier in this case means opportunities to create additional public-private partnerships, to create opportunities for early-stage clinical trials, and to create opportunities to attract additional talent to the region.
This is our priority over the next two to three years. We hope to expand the size of the Institute from the current 36 or 37 scientists to somewhere close to 50. We hope that it will generate additional momentum to spearhead innovation in terms of new biomedical research discoveries.
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