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I'm an MD PhD by training.
I work on the intersection of nanotechnology and medicine.
I've been starting companies at this interface
for a little while now.
I'm on my sixth company.
The seed of this actually goes back
a few years where Susan Hockfield who's
our former president and Nancy Hopkins and I got together
and realized that our women faculty
were under starting companies, even
though they were as successful.
If women were founding companies at the same rate
as their male colleagues, there would
be 40 more therapies, 40 more diagnostics, 40
more interventions.
And we don't have them to me is just a stupid waste of talent.
So the Future Founder Initiative is something
that we started kind of in the vein of incentive prize
competitions.
And this day has been building up with excitement for everyone
at Northpond for the better part of a year.
We selected a group of nine amazing women
in the fall, women in the School of Engineering.
I seek to find ways by which mechanics
can help us understand the world around us
better, even maybe our bodies.
And women in the School of Science.
[INAUDIBLE] is comfortable raising their hand
if they know somebody with bipolar disorder.
Yeah, so you can see that this is a large number.
Women from the media lab.
The power is in our hands to save
many lives by scanning the 2D arrays around your tissue
up to two--
We got all kinds of ideas that they
had been working on actually for years in their labs.
Microfluidic channels for drug delivery.
They can introduce solid state sensors, actuators,
all into a micro scale, hair thin fiber.
Via injection or spraying.
The localized delivery enabled us to confine the drug to right
where it's needed, eliminating systemic toxicity.
So we developed a device which allows
for us to expand cells within the confines of the screening
plates.
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We are planning to partner with these companies
that have these microbes that they can't currently
manufacture.
So this is a normal heartbeat.
Contrast this with atrial fibrillation
when there's quivering in the upper chambers of the heart,
a really common and really costly problem.
We've adapted this platform to identify
the genes required for the liver's remarkable regenerative
capacity.
We sort of code visioned this project together
between the School of Engineering,
and the Sloan School, and the Martin Trust Center.
And entrepreneurship is at the core of what we do at MIT.
And they spent all this time until today
working with mentors and with each other to create a cohort.
And we gave them programming to try
and sort of demystify the whole process.
And today was really a showcase to introduce them
into the community, to increase their visibility,
and to turn those ideas into entrepreneurship.
One thing that we did very deliberately
is actually not make the showcase day competitive.
We had them present a selection committee in a VC pitch format.
And so those winners have been pre-selected.
And that sort of takes the pressure
off tonight for the showcase.
We can just celebrate them all and show them off
to the community.
And it can really kind of be a victory lap for everybody.
Every one of them came with a business plan
that I think is fundable.
So I told all the ones that weren't the top three
winners tonight that I'm stacking
the room with investors.
And I hope to get them all funded.
And we envision that this could be
kind of a playbook for other institutions
to encourage their women and minority faculty.
And while it's true that starting a company
is no small undertaking, the models
can be different than we perceive
them to be if we participate and change the game.
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