Monique Yoakim-Turk

Monique Yoakim-Turk ’87, ’88 has had her eye on the future of medicine throughout her career. She does this by shepherding laboratory breakthroughs during the long and complex process that puts lifesaving and life-changing therapies into the hands of patients and their doctors. She has done this work in both academia and at major biotechnology firms. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, Yoakim-Turk managed several international alliances for the biotech firm and vaccine creator Moderna that supported the development of revolutionary mRNA (messenger RNA) therapeutics and combination products. Her role made her one of eight Lebanese Americans at Moderna to receive the National Order of Merit from the Lebanese government.

Intellectual property development was not the obvious career path for Yoakim-Turk when she earned her undergraduate degree in biology at UMass Lowell, or even when she arrived at a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School in 1995. Until then, she had traveled an exemplary but expected path through academic biomedical research. 

As a UMass Lowell undergraduate, she won the Outstanding Scholar Award in Biological Science for having the department’s highest GPA. She went on to earn a master’s degree in biology from UML and a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the Tufts Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, researching the way a type of virus uses a cell’s own signaling pathways to trigger tumor growth.

A one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Tufts followed, leading to a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, where the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recognized her with an Individual National Research Service Award.

Yoakim-Turk’s success in academic biomedical research seemed assured, but she was not satisfied with her role. “Science is my passion, but I didn't want to be at the lab bench anymore. 

I wanted to see the rest of the story, not just the science piece,” she says. “I wanted to understand how research could translate into something practical.”

She landed an internship in the intellectual property office of Boston Children’s Hospital, the pediatric training and research hospital of Harvard Medical School. The internship placed her at the intersection of science, business and law.

Yoakim-Turk used her science background to evaluate research findings, then worked with law firms to file patents before teaming with its business experts to license the findings to industry so they could become commercial products. 

“To be honest, I thought I’d be there six months, max. I ended up being there for 19 years,” she says. “Part of the reason I stayed was that my role kept changing.” She quickly worked her way up from intern to senior licensing manager. From there, she became the director of pediatric initiatives in the intellectual property office. 

“There were always so many cool and exciting things to do,” she says. Then, seven years into this new career, she helped the hospital create a new way of turning scientific discoveries into practical medical treatments.

Starting in 2008, Yoakim-Turk spearheaded Boston Children’s Hospital’s Technology Development Fund, an academic investment fund formed to fill the funding gap between a good idea spun out of the hospital’s basic science research and a concept that was ready for acquisition by a biotech or pharmaceutical company to bring it to market. “The idea was to de-risk the investment required,” she says.

Yoakim-Turk gathered volunteers from among the Boston area’s venture capitalists and pharmaceutical and biotech executives to help the hospital find the most promising technologies among its academic research. 

The fund more than earned back its $8.5 million in investments over its first nine funding cycles. It saw $38 million in follow-on funding and 14 revenue-generating licenses, and it launched 11 startup companies that raised $104 million in seed funding.

Yoakim-Turk sees the startup Affinivax as one of the biggest successes in her time at the fund. This vaccine technology platform uses a protein and the sugary coat of a bacteria to stimulate the body’s immune system. One vaccine developed with the platform targets 24 strains of a bacteria that cause pneumonia, which is significantly more strains than were targeted by the existing vaccine.

Affinivax was ultimately acquired by international pharmaceutical giant GSK for $2.1 billion in cash, with the potential for another $1.2 billion in milestone payments.

Today, Yoakim-Turk works in alliance management at Biogen, a leading biotechnology company headquartered in Cambridge, coordinating with companies with which it has partnered to develop new products. “I’m having a blast,” she says.

Looking back at her time at UMass Lowell, Yoakim-Turk says that she gained even more than an excellent education and wonderful memories. The caring environment and academic rigor she experienced at the university reinforced her belief in purpose-driven communities and the scientific method as a philosophy of sorts that shows the value of diligence in the face of risk—not just in the laboratory, but in many aspects of life. 

“UMass Lowell is where I met my best friends,” she says. “We're still friends to this day. When my daughter went to college, I said, ‘I hope you find your best friends in college the way I did at UMass Lowell.’”

Opportunities for hands-on research experience on campus were pivotal for her.

“I did research in Professor Bob Lynch’s lab. He was a wonderful mentor. In the lab and in the Biology Department, I was part of a community of people trying to do the same thing—improve health care and do good for the world,” she says. “I’ve tried to have that sense of community all along in my life.”