Patients with incurable cancers, chronic pain sufferers, and people who rely on battery-powered medical implants could all benefit from ideas presented at the recent awards ceremony of the 2023-24 MIT-Royalty Pharma Prize Competition. This year’s top prize went to researchers and biotech entrepreneurs Anne Carpenter, Frederike Petzschner, and Betar Gallant (Class of 2008, SM Class of 2010, PhD Class of 2013).
Kit Hickey MBA ’13, executive director of the MIT Faculty Founder Initiative, will talk about the time and effort the three award winners and the other finalists put into the initiative, and the initiative’s mission to develop female faculty in biotechnology to bridge the gap between laboratory research and clinical applications.
“They took the courageous step of getting off the bench, even though they were already working seven days a week. They took time from their facilities, their labs, their lives, and got out there and dove into entrepreneurship,” Hickey says. “They did it because they wanted to see their innovations go out into the world and improve patients’ lives.”
Carpenter, senior director of the Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and an Institute Scientist, won the top prize in the 2023-24 MIT-Royalty Pharma Faculty Founder Prize Competition, which awards the competition $250,000. Carpenter specializes in using microscopic imaging of cells and computational methods such as machine learning to accelerate the identification of therapeutic compounds that, for example, shrink tumors. Identified compounds are then tested in biological assays that model the tumor ecosystem to examine how the compounds work in real tumors.
Carpenter’s startup, SyzOnc, launched in April, which he credits to support from the MIT Faculty Founder Initiative, a program that provides participants with mentorship, scholarships and advice from industry experts, as well as assistance with incorporation, management team formation, fundraising and intellectual property strategy.
“The program provided critical insights and information at key decision points that helped launch us into starting our company,” Carpenter said, adding, “Participating in the program validated our scientific idea and business plan. That kind of credibility is invaluable when raising capital, especially for first-time company founders.”
Carpenter said she and her team will “leverage the best biological and computational advances to develop new therapies to fight tumors such as sarcoma, pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma, which currently have dismal survival rates.”
The MIT Faculty Founder Initiative was launched in 2020 by the School of Engineering and the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship at MIT, based on research findings by Sangeeta Bhatia, Dean of the MIT Faculty Founder Initiative, Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT Corporation Life Member, MIT Dean Emeritus, Susan Hockfield, Professor of Neuroscience, and Nancy Hopkins, Professor of Biology Emeritus. The survey they conducted found that only about 9% of 250 biotechnology startups at MIT were founded by women, while female faculty accounted for 22%, which was published in the 2021 MIT Faculty Newsletter.
The data shows that “technology coming out of women’s labs is not being diverted, and as a result potential is being wasted,” Hickey says.
“The MIT Faculty Founder Initiative plays a vital role in MIT’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. By providing critical mentorship and resources to visionary faculty working on solutions in biotechnology, the initiative helps these solutions quickly get to market,” said Ananta Chandrakasan, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer, dean of the School of Engineering, and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
The MIT Faculty Founder Initiative Prize Competition was launched in 2021. This year’s competition featured judges representing academia, healthcare, biotechnology, and financial investment. In addition to awarding a grand prize, the competition also awarded two $100,000 cash prizes. One was awarded to a researcher from Brown University, the first university to collaborate with MIT on an entrepreneurship development program.
This year’s winner of the 2023-24 MIT-Royalty Pharma Faculty Founder Prize Competition ($100,000 prize) The runner-up was Frederike Petzschner, an assistant professor at Brown University’s Carney Institute for Brain Science, for her start-up SOMA’s digital pain management system, which helps patients manage and alleviate chronic pain.
“We utilize cutting-edge technology to provide precision care, with a particular focus on individualized cognitive interventions tailored to each patient’s unique needs,” she says.
Now that the startup is on the brink of incorporating, Petzschner says, “Without the Faculty Finder Initiative, our startup would still be striving to commercialize, but certainly at a much earlier and probably less structured stage.”
“The ongoing support from the program organizers and mentors really made a difference,” she says.
Gallant, an MIT Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and winner of the $100,000 2023-24 MIT-Royalty Pharma Faculty Founder Prize Competition Breakthrough Prize, leads the startup Halogen. An expert in advanced battery technology, Gallant and her team have developed high-density battery storage to improve the life and performance of medical devices such as pacemakers.
“If we can extend lifespan, it will extend the time between invasive replacement surgeries, which will really impact patients’ quality of life,” Gallant told MIT News in a 2022 interview.
Jim Reddock, executive vice president and chief scientific officer at sponsor Royalty Pharma, highlighted the company’s support of both the competition and the MIT Faculty Finder Initiative program.
“Royalty Pharma is excited to support the 2023-2024 MIT-Royalty Pharma Prize Competition and accelerate life sciences innovation at leading research institutions like MIT and Brown,” said Reddock. “By supporting incredible women entrepreneurs with this program, we hope to help move more ideas from the lab to biotech companies and ultimately into patients’ hands.”
Bhatia calls the MIT Faculty Founder Initiative a “playbook” for how to lead the high-impact, uncommercialized work of female faculty in the world of medicine.
“To me, changing the game means that when you have an invention in the lab, you’re well-connected with the ecosystem, you know when to become a company, who to contact, how to get your first investors, how to activate your team quickly, and you’re off to the races,” Bhatia says. “Any one of those inventions has the potential to become a drug as quickly as possible. That’s the future I envision.”
In his speech at the awards ceremony, co-founder Hockfield noted MIT’s role in promoting entrepreneurship and suggested Brown University was also involved in the effort.
“MIT has always been a leader in entrepreneurship,” Hockfield said, “and part of being a leader is sharing with the world. Our collaboration with Brown University on this cohort shows that MIT can share our approach with the world and that other universities can follow our model of supporting academic entrepreneurship.”
Hickey said that when she and Bhatia asked 30 female faculty members three years ago why they weren’t commercializing their technology, many of them said they didn’t have access to the right network of mentors, investors, role models and business partners needed to get on that path.
“I’m asking you to be the network that’s been missing,” Hickey told the awards ceremony audience of biotech industry leaders. “Get to know our incredible faculty and continue to support them. Join the movement.”
