The Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience: it’s actually an idea.
It’s a mindset of bringing people together from disparate areas to tackle the world’s
toughest problems, whether that’s Alzheimer’s disease, whether that’s cancer.
One way I like to think of convergence is as collisions; very different ways of thinking
about the same problem, and actually, we have a new type of fabric of knowledge that none
of these individuals could have achieved on their own.
Some of the most difficult problems that exist today don’t live within a field.
People are not there as a physicist, or as a chemist, or as an engineer.
They’re there as someone trying to solve a problem.
With the evolution of technology which is really exponential, now is the time that
problems that in the past were considered unsolvable can actually be solved.
Michelson Center for Convergent Biosciences really exists on two levels.
It has a physical heart, Michelson Hall.
It’s going to allow us to bring people together to bump into each other in the hallways, to
talk about problems from their own perspective, but to be able to bounce it off other people’s
ideas from a different perspective.
The way that I’ve been brought up in the academic world, you have to have collaborators,
you have to have expertise from all disciplines, and it really does make a difference moving
forward and trying to accelerate translation into the clinic.
Michelson Center for Convergent Biosciences reaches out from the bricks and mortar of
this fantastic facility to the pharmacy school.
It reaches out to the cinema school, to the medical school.
It’s gonna reach out across our entire community into the world at-large.
Someone will emerge as the biotech capital of the world.
L.A. is one of those places that’s in a position to have this happen.
At USC, here’s an opportunity to actually have our hands in it.
What really appealed to the Michelson’s is the idea that USC was really focused on
solving problems.
Being entrepreneurial, creating change; USC as a thought leader is the perfect place to
get this done.
This is really the future of science, and how people will discover new things.
I am laser focused on understanding cancer better.
Making great advances on the liquid biopsy using blood samples.
Pharmaceutical companies are coming back to us in these conversations.
We don’t know yet who owns the problem.
So that means we have to have all the different stakeholders around the table.
We develop mathematical models to help understand cell signaling, these very fundamental engineering
concepts, and we’re applying them to complex biological systems, and right now we’re
focusing on cancer cells.
To be able to come into contact with biologists will prompt new ways of thinking, really new
ways to build the models to take into account some of things that as engineers, we just
don’t have a lot of experience with.
So, it’s profound to think that an idea that you have in your head can be executed
with this great team, and then actually be translated to the clinic, and actually impact
patient care.
If we do this right, thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, are going to be touched
by this new approach.
What our pioneer group have generated is unprecedented in the history of science and engineering
at USC.
In order to for us to be able to see a multiplier effect, we need support.
We can be the center for the 21st century way of doing bioscience, biotechnology, bioengineering.
Ways that’ll be faster to the marketplace.
Ways that will transform the way we think about health and disease; the place people look
at as they start to copy how we do science in the 21st century, because of the launch
of the Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience.