By Justin Morse
The Bench to Bedside Initiative (BBI) will start off the 2017 academic year with an information session this July 18th in the Belfer Research Building, room 204A, at 6:30pm. Thomas Galassi, president of BBI, will discuss the upcoming BBI course due to start this fall semester followed by a Q&A for interested participants. Tom will also answer questions about this September’s BBI kickoff event, an annual BBI event where entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists and business professionals will be able to find teammates for the December 2017 Pitch Day Competition. Pizza will be served.
BBI is composed of an interdisciplinary team from Weill Cornell Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Rockefeller University that works to transform basic science insights within the Tri-I community into medical innovation. To that end, the BBI offers a yearly course for professionals and students alike to learn fundamentals of the biotech industry, from designing a business plan to delivering an effective business pitch at investor meetings. Over the course of 12 weeks, participants will build a business plan around patented technologies held by the Tri-I with the help of professionals within the BBI’s extensive network. The culmination of the semester-long course is the highly anticipated Pitch Day Competition, where BBI participants deliver their business pitch to a panel of leading experts from the biotech space, venture capitalists, and consultants.
Past participants of the BBI course and winners of the 2016 Pitch Day competition include OneThreeBiotech, a company that leverages techniques in artificial intelligence to guide drug discovery and design, and iDu Optics, inventors of a microscope adapter that enables users to take high quality micrographs with iPhone cameras. In addition to winning seed funding, accounting services and a combined $25,000 in legal consultation fees from Paul Hastings LLP at the 2016 Pitch Day, both OneThreeBiotech and iDu Optics have achieved accolades beyond the BBI setting. OneThreeBiotech placed best in show at the Mid Atlantic Bio Angels (MABA) 1st Pitch Life Science Event this past March. Not long after, iDu Optics took home first prize and $25,000 of seed funding from the inaugural Dean’s Entrepreneurship Lab Biomedical Business Plan Challenge, a competition sponsored by Weill Cornell Medicine in May 2017 to foster an entrepreneurial ecosystem throughout the medical campus.
Not all BBI participants are expected to turn the skills learned throughout the course into a full-fledged biotech startup. For many, the elective complements their ongoing training as clinicians or biomedical researchers. Says President Galassi, “the BBI course is a great way for students and professionals to develop an extra set of tools beyond their formal training”, continuing that “the course is a great opportunity to learn how discoveries in the lab or clinical setting can translate into innovation within the biotech space”. The ‘Bench to Bedside: Business Fundamentals for Entrepreneurial Scientists’ course begins this fall.
Bench to Bedside Initiative Newsletter 