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]

Teams Pitch Once More at Culmination of CIMIT/B-BIC Boot Camp, Sure to Not Be Their Last

The program ended as it had begun: with a pitch. Just as the teams had done on day one, except this time armed with loads more insight on the value of their innovative business concepts garnered from a combined 500 customer interviews, they assumed their place in front of a room full of strangers turned peers and mentors to present how, with their idea, patient care would be forever changed...[continue reading]

Meeting & Mixing of the Minds at BU OTD’s Tech, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll

It was an evening full of collisions of all kinds at the Boston University Office of Technology Development’s 6th Annual Tech, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll (TDRR) held in the George Sherman Union on BU’s campus set along Boston’s Commonwealth Ave. Entrepreneurs, academic scientists, industry folks and funders from venture capital and government / non-profit entities alike mixed and mingled over the course of an eventful evening. Much of the action centered around “Funder Alley” – a row of booths and monitor displays that featured many of the area’s funders of upstart biotechnology...[continue reading]

A Nuanced View of the World of Drug Development & its Value to Society

It’s not every day that you have the opportunity to play audience to a preeminent biotech company’s chief executive (in Boston it’s more like every other day), so I couldn’t pass it up when I learned Genzyme CEO David Meeker, MD, would be sitting down with Boston Globe Life Sciences Reporter Robert Weisman for a “fireside chat” (hold the fire) hosted by the MIT Enterprise Forum at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard in Cambridge’s Kendall Square. Equally compelling was the thought provoking topic of conversation; “The Value of Drug Development: Can Society Afford Today’s New Wonder Drugs?” Given Dr. Meeker’s previous clinical and academic accomplishments as former Director of the Pulmonary Critical Care Fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic and Assistant Professor at Ohio State University, plus a variety of high-level managerial undertakings with Genzyme prior to becoming CEO, he seemed uniquely positioned to offer a nuanced take on the world of drug development and its value to society...[continue reading]

Leveraging Machine Learning Muscle at the Brigham & Women's Hospital iHub Idea Lab with Microsoft

The air was electric in the Shapiro Room at Brigham & Women’s Hospital (BWH), the setting for the BWH iHub Idea Lab with Microsoft on the evening of Monday, June 22nd. With innumerable ideas afloat on the topic of “Machine Learning in Healthcare,” it seemed it would be only a matter of time until lightning struck – in the form of a truly groundbreaking idea to improve population health and/or care management. Combining the clinical and technical acumens of members in attendance from the respective BWH and Microsoft communities, it appeared that the necessary parts were all in place, like a well-oiled Rube Goldberg machine, to harness the room’s bottled energy to propel forward real world solutions to some of healthcare’s most nagging problems...[continue reading]

Nine Teams Begin Commercialization Boot Camp, Canvas their Biomedical Business Concepts

On Day 1 of the CIMIT/B-BIC i-Corps Healthcare Commercialization Boot Camp, nine teams of innovators from a selection of the area’s most esteemed academic and medical institutions - including Boston Children's Hospital, Boston University, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Mass General Hospital, MIT and Yale - convened at Boston University to start the process of developing a commercialization roadmap for their projects. They shared their ideas in confidence, received valuable insight and feedback from expert mentors and coaches, and learned more about the commercialization road ahead...[continue reading]