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 was 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 Founders 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...who here 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 microscale hair thin fiber. Via injection or spraying the localized delivery enable 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 these screening plates
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 co-visioned this project together between the School of Engineering and
the Sloan School - 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
sort of create a cohort we gave them programming to try and sort of demystify the whole process
and today is really a showcase to introduce them to 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 to 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 like no small undertaking the models can be different than
we perceive them to be if we participate and change the game.