Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Changing the game”.
[, MUSIC PLAYING ], [, MUSIC, PLAYIING ], 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.
[, LAUGHTER ]. 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. [ INAUDIBLE, ], [, CHEERING AND MUSIC ] .