Summers are for Networking – Boston Biotech Edition

Summer in Boston, for many of its native residents and workers, means vacation… or at the very least bearing the city heat for an abridged work week before expatriating to the coastal oases of the Cape, Islands, and South or North Shores. For a city with such a dominant academic presence, summer also beckons a changing of the guards, as the universities empty out of their student occupants only to be replaced on the city streets by fleets of vacationing tourists seeking to capture a slice of this historic colonial town.

What summers in Boston might be less known for are the professional networking opportunities. Though, given Boston’s standing as the world’s preeminent biotech hub, there is plenty of good reason to stick around town...[continue reading]

Broad Institute Symposium Explores Pipeline Connecting Intellectual Property & Innovation

Broad Institute President & Founding Director Eric Lander, PhD, provides welcome and opening remarks at the 2016 Broad Institute Innovation & Intellectual Property Symposium.

The Broad Institute, or simply ‘The Broad’, is a decade-old biomedical and genomic research powerhouse in the heart of Kendall Square which has quickly amassed global influence. Its roots span back to the early 1990’s at the beginnings of the international Human Genome Project, a mountain of a scientific mission that required unprecedented coordination among researchers and scientific enterprises. Enlisted for the effort were local stalwarts MIT, Harvard Medical School, its affiliated hospitals, and the relative new-kid-on-the-Kendall-Square-block Whitehead Institute. From this ad hoc assembly of prestigious labs the Broad grew...[continue reading]

The Apprentice is In – Bolstering Biomedical Innovation with Discourse & Training in Technology Commercialization

This April marks the fourth offering of the B-BIC Skills Development Center’s (SDC) hallmark event, The Commercialization Apprenticeship Panel Series. The event, entitled “Science in the Spotlight: Why Media Training Matters,” scheduled for April 14th, 4-7PM at Massachusetts General Hospital, will highlight the importance of communicating science to the general public for the advancement of researchers’ science and careers. As in the past, the talk is free and open to the public, though will predominantly cater to Boston’s prominent biomedical community – particularly investigators, clinicians, and institutional leadership...[continue reading]

Paying it Forward – MIT Series Taps Serial Entrepreneur Scientists for Lessons on Commercialization

As one of today’s most accomplished scientist-entrepreneurs, it is hard to believe that Dr. Robert (Bob) Langer nearly missed getting his start in academia altogether. It’s the type of story line that could be easily discarded as a piece of academic folklore, unless you were to hear it directly from the man himself. This type of candid disclosure from experienced entrepreneurs is exactly the goal driving the MIT Fireside Chat Series on “The Do’s and Don’ts of Scientific Commercialization”...[continue reading]

Out of the Lab & Back – Insights on Science Media Coverage

Boston Business Journal’s BioFlash, MIT Technology Review, STAT, Xconomy – go-to science and technology publications with established local presences and a collective readership stretching near and far – assembled representatives for a power-packed panel at JLABS’s (Johnson & Johnson Innovation) “Out of the Lab and Into the Newsroom.” The cast of journalists intended to shed light on media relations for the area’s mission-driven science community, which is characteristically so laser-focused on forging new frontiers of human knowledge that they could admittedly use a reminder about the merits of communicating their science to the general public...[continue reading]

Inspecting the Innovation Narrative: where it’s been, where it’s headed

As a popular buzzword, innovation has accumulated serious mileage over the years. It has made its way out of the garages of Silicon Valley and into the boardrooms of nearly every modern employment sector (industry, government, academics), and even into our everyday conversations. Interestingly, the word is also accompanied by a lack of consensus on its meaning. One simple definition of innovation is: “the introduction of something new.” However, if we examine a few examples of how the word is being employed, it becomes clear this is not the operational definition...[continue reading]

Everybody's Gotta Eat, Right?

"Unlike some similar organizations, which deliver meals mainly for the sake of ease and convenience, Community Servings is anchored by its belief that food is medicine, and that eating the right things can make an impact on treatment."

If it's helpful to think of food as medicine, then why not throw water and air into the mix too? I mean, we need them to live, right?

Is our society so healthcare-inclined that we can't think of life's essentials other than in medical terms? Air is air, water is water, food is food - they're all made up of atoms. We need these things to live regardless of if we're sick. Medicine has its proper place.

So it makes total sense then that an organization like Community Servings exists (at least in America where publicly funded social services are all but forgotten). They're great - and I recommend to anyone interested, read the article, volunteer your free time. And think about how we can bolster our health system to make being healthy easy!

Re: "Community Servings Delivers Medically Tailored Meals to Chronically Ill Patients"- J. Ducharme, Boston Magazine Blog, 09/10/15

Title inspired by "The Food" by Common featuring Kanye West on the Dave Chappelle Show (2005).