Story of Impact - NYAS

A revamped “From Idea to IPO” course program provides a crash course in entrepreneurship for the scientifically savvy.

Published June 1, 2012

By Christina Duffy

Image courtesy of ILEXX – istockphoto.com.

When Ching Yao Yang, a PhD candidate working in materials chemistry at New York University, received an email from his lab advisor detailing problems with lab management, he had a great idea for a new company: “I wanted to create an environment for people to use technology in the lab, not only researchers, but primary investigators and vendors.” But with no formal business training, he was not sure where to start.

Enter “From Idea to IPO,” a course offered by The New York Academy of Sciences through the Academy’s Science Alliance, which provides career education, development, and training for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Science professionals enrolled in the 12-week course gain the tools necessary to understand, grow, and sustain a start-up business—moving ideas from the lab to the business world—and bring it to life in the ever-changing marketplace of New York City.

Since Science Alliance introduced the “From Idea to IPO” course in 2004, it has been one of its most popular and longest running programs; approximately 500 young scientists in the NYC metropolitan area have taken the course thus far.

A Fresh Perspective

Earlier this year, Science Alliance Director Monica Kerr took over the direction and teaching of “From Idea to IPO,” using the opportunity to breathe new life into the program.

“My goal was to freshen up an ongoing, popular program that was running nearly unchanged since its launch in 2004 and also address some challenges I had observed,” says Kerr.

Kerr, who earned her PhD in cell and developmental biology from the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program at Harvard Medical School, realized that in a world of constantly evolving technology and business models, the course had, in recent years, lost some of its luster and that beneath its dulled surface lay the perfect marriage of science and business.

“As I was restructuring the curriculum, I aimed to not only teach the nuts and bolts of starting a new venture, but to also cultivate entrepreneurial skills, off er exposure to the start-up community in NYC, and increase awareness of various career paths supporting the commercialization of science,” says Kerr, who took a systematic approach to revamping the course curriculum through use of existing successful models.

“I accomplished this by incorporating more active learning approaches, which have been shown to be highly effective in increasing student learning and recruiting 15 guest contributors from the local entrepreneurial ecosystem,” says Kerr.

These changes were directly influenced by a similar course taught at Stanford University School of Engineering by consulting professor Tom Kosnik, who was instrumental in sharing course lecture notes and materials, says Kerr. Andrew Nelson, co-author of Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise, also assisted in thinking about syllabus design and how to utilize and incorporate the textbook.

“Opportunity Recognition and Evaluation” and “Pursuit of Opportunity”

Kerr has divided the course into two modules: “Opportunity Recognition and Evaluation,” which covers innovations in technology, the creation of business models, and entrepreneurial marketing, and “Pursuit of Opportunity,” which covers the more concrete components of business, including patent protection, finance, accounting basics, and start-up and venture capital.

Students put this knowledge to use by undertaking course-long team projects where they work through the process of starting a mock company using a science-based business idea they decide upon as a team. Each team is assigned a local mentor who works in the entrepreneurship field, who they can go to for support and advice.

Guest speakers for the course include entrepreneurs as well as members of the technology transfer, legal, accounting, and finance communities. Many of these guest speakers also come back to serve as judges for the final day of the course, when students “pitch” their mock companies to a panel of experts and get personalized feedback on everything from their business idea to their presentation style.

New York City Entrepreneur-in-Residence Melinda Thomas, who serves as both a guest speaker and a judge for the course, has noticed a positive change in the course over the past year. “I was very impressed by the change in terms of it being more engaging. Monica is using the case method to teach points. Students work through a real company that has a real issue and they become more engaged in having to think it through.”

Thomas—who has been the business brains behind several successful medical and science start-ups and is now a leader in the NYC start-up community—believes that the team building component of the course is very beneficial in crafting profitable science-based business ideas.

From Mock Project to Marketplace

“Once you have an idea and start your company, you won’t have all the skills needed to create the product. You’re going to have to work in a team and learn how to ask the right questions.” While scientists are used to working together to solve problems, points out Thomas, working through problems in a business capacity can take some practice.

One illustration of exemplary teamwork that came out of the most recent “From Idea to IPO” course is Team Benchsoft. Comprised of scientists from a variety of disciplines, three members of Team Benchsoft —including Ching Yao Yang, who came up with the idea for a better lab management system—have forged ahead with their mock class project, taking it to the marketplace. With their only formal business training coming in the form of Kerr’s instruction in “From Idea to IPO,” Yang, Jasmin Hume, and Raul Catena have made the commitment to start a real company.

Since taking the course, they have written a business plan, created an advisory board, and incorporated the company. They are currently shopping the company around to angel investors. “We are moving really quickly,” says Hume. “During the course, we were learning and implementing simultaneously.” Hume, a PhD candidate who works in the lab with Yang, feels that the material they learned in the course was directly—and immediately—applicable to the process of creating a start-up company.

“Learning about the sequence of events has been really helpful. It’s important to know where to focus at each point in the process, whether it’s on building a prototype or looking for money,” says Catena.

Success Story

Yang cites the expert guest speakers and the team’s mentor as a big part of their early success. “Our mentor has the same background as us (a PhD) so he was able to give us constructive criticism on both the technical and business aspects of our idea.”

When asked about the ideal outcomes of the course, Kerr cites a variety of potential results—from students obtaining positions in technology transfer, patent law, venture capital, or at a start-up to students gaining new skills that are helpful for advancement regardless of career path. However, it’s clear that she is particularly proud of Team Benchsoft and Yang, Hume, and Catena’s transition to real-life entrepreneurs.

“It has been very inspiring to instill in students very practical information and skills that they can begin to implement immediately. Hearing them report that they feel equipped with the tools to start a new venture, and then to see one team actually in the process of pursuing this with their team project, is very validating.”

About the Author

Christina Duffy is a freelance writer in New York City.

Nutrition on a Global and Local Scale

Rafael Pérez-Escamilla works to create and implement public health nutrition programs around the world, but realizes that effective programs must take both a global and local view.

Published June 1, 2012

By Marci A. Landsmann

Image courtesy of bit24 via stock.adobe.com.

“Good health” is more than a fortuitous platitude; a nutritious diet can help humans plot the course to lifelong wellness—a fact not lost to scientists and public health experts.

But despite efforts of governments and international organizations to equitably provide nutritious food supplies, more than 2 billion people worldwide are still malnourished. Working to further understand the variables at play, Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, professor of epidemiology and public health and director, Office of Community Health, Yale School of Public Health, has spent his career elucidating the roots of nutrition inequities—in addition to paving the way for practical solutions.

“Of course, it’s important to understand the mechanisms of nutrition at the molecular and cellular levels,” Pérez-Escamilla says. “But on the other hand, we have to be able to translate the vast knowledge that we now have into effective public health programs and there is a science to this too.”

Pérez-Escamilla has used the precision of science to track the impact of food insecurity in Brazil. His efforts started on a small scale with an experience-based household survey of some 120 households in the city of Campinas, which quickly grew into a national project. This major undertaking has not only helped the Brazilian government target and monitor the impact of its hunger eradication programs but has also allowed researchers to identify the causes of food insecurity and how this condition affects human development.

Improving Food Security Governance

Since being put into wide-scale use in Brazil, as well as Colombia and Mexico, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization has been disseminating the Latin America and Caribbean Food Security Scale, developed under the leadership of Pérez-Escamilla and colleagues, as a standard for the entire region. This is a major step forward for improving food security governance, as the scale allows key stakeholders to accurately measure strides in their efforts against household food insecurity and malnourishment.

“It’s fundamental to be able to compare progress across countries but also for countries to have simple but valid measures that they can trust and build policies around,” says Pérez-Escamilla. With funding from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Pérez-Escamilla has also recently led the development of a breastfeeding scale up model that encourages new mothers to breastfeed.

Exclusive breastfeeding for six months is one of the most cost-effective maternal-child health interventions, but many barriers have prevented the successful promotion of this optimal infant feeding behavior on a global scale. Pérez-Escamilla aims to overcome these barriers with well-coordinated, intersectoral strategies that engage new mothers in health facilities as well as in community settings.

A Goal to Help All

Whether analyzing the best way to promote breastfeeding or crafting metrics to realistically paint pictures of household food insecurity and malnutrition around the world, Pérez-Escamilla’s goal is to help “all people at all times to have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life.”

This seemingly simple definition of food security, crafted at the World Food Summit in 1996, provides an ideal expectation but in no way drafts a map to that end Understanding Household Food Insecurity Less-developed countries are increasingly inheriting some of the nutritional problems of more developed countries, largely because of the adoption of Western diets and lifestyles. For example, rates of overweight/obesity in some countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are now comparable to those in the United States, Pérez-Escamilla points out.

“In middle income countries food insecurity at the household level is not really related as much to food quantity anymore as it is to dietary quality. A low quality diet among the poor is often times the result of lack of economic or physical access to nutritious foods such as fruits and vegetables and easy access to highly caloric, unhealthy foods,” says Pérez-Escamilla. This reflects the alarming increases in obesity among the poor in these countries.

“Sadly, little is being done to try to apply lessons learned from countries more advanced in this nutrition transition to prevent the same outcome from happening in areas where the transition is less advanced, as in Sub-Saharan Africa. I believe addressing this gap should be a major global health focus.”

Developed Countries Not Immune

In addition, Pérez-Escamilla has learned that people in developed countries are not immune to nutrition-related health inequities. This motivated him to lead a National Institutes of Health-funded study examining the impact of community health workers at improving behavioral, metabolic, and health outcomes among Latinos with Type 2 diabetes in the United States.

“When I came to Connecticut in the early ‘90s and learned about the major health inequities affecting Latinos in the wealthiest state in the country, I decided to reconsider the single focus of my work in developing countries,” says Pérez-Escamilla. “As soon as I started doing this work, I realized how common the root of health inequities is regardless of geographical location. The root is what we now refer to as ‘the social determinants of health’ that calls for well-integrated, multi-level and multi-sectoral solutions developed and governed in strong partnership with affected communities.”

Just as systems biology analyzes the interplay between biological systems, the problems of malnutrition and global health are also complex. “Global health is local health. I understand global as a complex system and local as the cells that form the system. As a result of globalization, local communities, or the cells, are strongly interlinked with each other both within regions and countries and across countries and global macroregions,” says Pérez-Escamilla.

“If the architecture of global health governance continues to be fundamentally inequitable, then the ultimate global health goal of attaining ‘health for all’ regardless of where a human being is born becomes impossible to achieve.”

About the Author

Marci A. Landsmann is a medical writer in Philadelphia.

The Rise of Big Data: The Utility of Datasets

Data visualization and machine learning will be key to analyzing large datasets in this new scientific revolution.

Published March 1, 2012

By Diana Friedman

Image courtesy of A.JourMory – via stock.adobe.com.

The importance of observation—the crux of the scientific method—remains unchanged from the early days of scientific discovery. The methods by which observations are made, however, have changed greatly. Consider astronomy. In the early days, under a black expanse of night punctuated by brilliant fiery lights, a group of science-minded people looked up at the sky and recorded what they saw—the fullness of the moon, the locations and formations of the stars.

Observation with the naked eye was the norm until the 17^th century, when the invention of the telescope revolutionized astronomy, allowing scientists to see beyond what their eyes could show them—a literal portal into the unknown.

A New Revolution

Now, a new revolution is taking place, in astronomy and across nearly all scientific disciplines: a data revolution. Scientific data collection has become almost entirely automated, allowing for the collection of vast amounts of data at record speed. These massive datasets allow researchers from various organizations and locales to mine and manipulate the data, making new discoveries and testing hypotheses from the contents of a spreadsheet.

“The astronomy community was able to switch to the idea that they can use a database as a telescope,” says Alex Szalay, Alumni Centennial Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, as well as a researcher in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a 10+ year effort to map one-third of the sky.

Thanks to projects like the SDSS and open access data from the Hubble Space Telescope, would-be Galileos don’t need access to a telescope, or even a view of the night sky, to make discoveries about our universe. Instead, huge data sets (so-called “big data”) can provide the optimal view of the sky, or, for that matter, the chemical base pairs that make up DNA.

How Big is ‘Big Data’?

It is hard to estimate exactly how much data exists today compared to the early days of computers. But, “the amount of personal storage has expanded dramatically due to items like digital cameras and ‘intellectual prosthetics,’ like iPhones,” says Johannes Gehrke, professor, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University. “For example, if you bought a hard drive 20 years ago, you would have had 1.5 to 2 gigabytes of storage. Today, you can easily get 2 terabytes. That’s a factor of 1,000.”

It is not just the amount of data that has changed; the way we interact with and access that data has changed too, says Gehrke, a 2011 winner of the New York Academy of Sciences Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists. “There is an entire industry that has sprung up around our ability to search and manage data—look at Google and Microsoft,” says Szalay.

But what is big data? Is a 2-terabyte file considered big data? Not anymore. “It’s a moving target,” says Szalay. “In 1992, we thought a few terabytes was very challenging.” Now, the average portable, external hard drive can store a few terabytes of data. An easy definition of big data is “more data than a traditional data system can handle,” says Gehrke.

Searching for Structure

Scientists working on large-scale projects, like the SDSS, or those in genomics or theoretical physics, now deal with many terabytes, even petabytes, of information. How is it possible to make sense of so much data?

“We have the data—we can collect it—but the bottleneck occurs when we try to look at it,” says Szalay. Szalay is currently working on a project at Johns Hopkins to build a data-driven supercomputer (called a data scope) that will be able to analyze the big datasets generated by very large computer simulations, such as simulations of turbulence. “We are able to provide scientists who don’t usually have access to this kind of computing power with an environment where they can play with very large simulations over several months; with this computer we are providing a home to analyze big data.”

The rub? Scientists need to be fluent in computation and data analysis to use such resources. “Disciplines in science have been growing apart because they are so specialized, but we need scientists, regardless of their specific niche, to get trained in computation and data analytics. We need scientists to make this transition to ultimately increase our knowledge,” says Szalay.

Two fields in particular are garnering attention from scientists for their ability to provide structure when data is overwhelming: data visualization and machine learning.

Picture This

Data visualization takes numbers that are either generated by a large calculation or acquired with a measurement and turns them into pictures, says Holly Rushmeier, chair and professor, Department of Computer Science, Yale University, and a judge for the Academy’s Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists. For example, a project might take numbers representing flow going through a medium and turn them into an animation.

“Visualization allows you to look at a large volume of numbers and look for patterns, without having a preconceived notion of what that pattern is,” says Rushmeier. In this way, visualization is both a powerful debugging tool (allowing researchers to see, through the creation of a nonsensical picture, if there might be a flaw with their data) and an important means for communication of data, whether to other researchers or to the general public (asin the case of weather forecasts). So perhaps the old adage needs to be re-written: Is a picture now worth a thousand lines of code?

“There are many flavors of visualization,” says Rushmeier. Information can be mapped onto a natural structure, such as valves being mapped onto the heart, or an entirely new picture can be created (data without a natural structure is referred to as high-dimensional data). The classic example of high-dimensional data is credit card data, says Rushmeier, “but there is a lot of high-dimensional data in science.”

Mapping Information

Rushmeier is currently immersed in 3D mapping, working closely with an ornithologist who studies bird vision. He records light waves to which birds are sensitive, from the UV to the infrared, to get a better sense of how bird vision evolved and for what purposes (e.g., mating and survival). Through 3D mapping, Rushmeier is able to take the ornithologist’s numerical data and simulate the actual viewpoint of the bird onto different 3D surfaces.

“To stop a conversation dead in its tracks, I tell people I work in statistics. To get a conversation going, I say I work in artificial intelligence,” jokes David Blei. Both are true—Blei, associate professor, computer science, Princeton University, works in the field of machine learning, a field that encompasses both statistical and computational components.

The goal of machine learning is to build algorithms that find patterns in big datasets, says Blei. Patterns can either be predictive or descriptive, depending on the goal. “A classic example of a predictive machine-learning task is spam filtering,” says Blei. A descriptive task could, for instance, help a biologist pinpoint information about a specific gene from a large dataset.

Part of our Daily Lives

Machine learning is not only used by technology companies and scientists—it is a part of our daily lives. The Amazon shopping and Netflix recommendations that pop up almost instantaneously on our computer and TV screens are a result of complex machine-learning algorithms, and the recommendations are often eerily spot-on. But it is important to remember that getting from data to real information requires a step, says Blei. This is especially true when machine learning is applied to science and medicine.

“We need more work in exploratory data analysis,” says Blei, as well as careful validation of algorithms, to avoid making irresponsible conclusions. Interestingly, Blei says that quality of data is not as important to the final result as it might seem; instead, quantity of data is paramount when it comes to drawing conclusions through machine learning. And enormous datasets abound in science—just consider all of the raw data generated by The Human Genome Project.

Now, says Blei, the analysis of data sources (like Twitter) pose an equally big challenge. “Unlike a dataset, a data source has no beginning and no end.”

A prediction that doesn’t require a complex algorithm? The fields of data visualization and machine learning, as well as other forms of data science, will continue to grow in importance as datasets and data sources get bigger over time and everyone, from neuroscientists to corporations, looks for a way to turn data into meaningful information.

Also read:

Why Good Science Resists Characterization

“Science is an adventure; it’s the human search for knowledge and new ideas that can better humankind.”

Published December 1, 2011

By Marci A. Landsmann

Image courtesy of amorn via stock.adobe.com.

Science is a discipline that whittles the abstract into clear and precise terms. So it might seem odd, at first, that Elias Zerhouni, former director of the National Institutes of Health and esteemed scientist, takes issue with certain characterizations.

“I don’t like to call something, ‘basic science’ or ‘translational science,’” says Zerhouni, a member of the Academy President’s Council. “It’s either good science or bad science. I don’t think we should characterize any type of science. Science is an adventure; it’s the human search for knowledge and new ideas that can better humankind. To pigeonhole types of science is, in my view, not beneficial.”

Definitions can create barriers, says Zerhouni. And he has spent his life stepping over such lines, first in academia at Johns Hopkins, then at the National Institutes of Health, and now in private industry in his recently assumed role as president of global research and development at Sanofi-Aventis.

In the early days of Zerhouni’s career as a radiologist at Johns Hopkins, he recalls not being able to secure NIH funding for his own research, because it didn’t fit neatly into a single disease process or under the purview of one single NIH institute. It took private industry funding to make his proposed research path—which years later led to imaging technologies that could show the heart in three dimensions and help clinicians decipher between cancerous and noncancerous nodules in the lungs—a reality.

Funding Reform

Zerhouni got the opportunity to make changes in the way the NIH chooses and awards research grants when he was appointed NIH director. He assembled a multidisciplinary team and a “Roadmap for Medical Research,” which isolated areas of science that would most benefit from cross-collaboration. The NIH Reform Act of 2008 established the NIH’s Common Fund, specifically for research that involves at least two of the 27 institutes in the NIH. In addition, it also set up funds for the Pioneer Award, which supports individual scientists of exceptional creativity who propose pioneering, and possibly transforming, approaches to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research, despite not fitting neatly into a single disease category.

“You need a diversity of approaches,” Zerhouni says. “Sometimes funding agencies use a one-size-fits-all approach, which doesn’t help the real nature of science, which can go from the proverbial single investigator in the lab doing fundamental observation…to having the ability to put together teams to understand computational biology and bioinformatics. So in my view, the funding agency should reflect the realities of science and not the other way around.”

During his time at the NIH, Zerhouni encouraged further collaboration between scientists by creating multi-principal investigator grants, which allowed each scientist on a project to have lead investigator status. “Under a single lead investigator system, everybody else would be secondary. Well, that, in some way, discourages collaboration because everyone wants to be recognized in their own field as the top scientist.” The multi-PI grant gave scientists equal billing to contribute to the scientific problem at hand—and to converge in the same way as science does.

Matter of Perspective

Zerhouni attributes his success, in part, to his own unique background. Algerian-born, Zerhouni came to America when he was 24, after securing a residency at Johns Hopkins. He quickly learned the role perspective can play in the world of medicine.

“I think maybe part of my ability to succeed here is that I can bring a viewpoint that many people feel is sometimes surprisingly different and constructive in showing there is a different way,” says Zerhouni. “I think being an immigrant enriches the mix.” He applauds the U.S. for welcoming scientific immigrants and their contributions, pointing out that science is the great peacemaker.

Zerhouni cites the fact that 30% of all Nobel Peace Prizes in Medicine have been won by immigrant Americans. “No country has all of the talent to overcome its problems and that’s why I think science has to be global, it has to be without artificial barriers, and we should encourage collaboration and self-assembly wherever it comes from, provided that it is good science.”

About the Author

Marci A. Landsmann is a medical writer in Philadelphia.

A Conversation with Napoleone Ferrara

“We want to know why, for example, not all tumors respond to vascular endothelial growth factor inhibitors. We want to understand resistance.”

Published December 1, 2011

By Diana Friedman

Napoleone Ferrara (center) receives the 2011 Dr. Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research with (left to right) Joaquin Duato (J&J), Craig Mello (University of Massachusetts Medical School; Howard Hughes Medical Institute), Harlan Weisman (J&J) and Paul Stoffels (J&J).

Napoleone Ferrar, a Genentech Fellow, discusses his life’s work: from discovering the core angiogenic signaling molecule, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), to creating anti-VEGF therapeutics for wet age-related macular degeneration and cancerous tumors.

What motivated you to go into research?

I studied medicine in Catania, Italy, my hometown. Initially I thought that clinical medicine was very interesting, but I didn’t have a firm direction. Then, I met a professor of pharmacology with an established research group. I joined this group as a medical student and that’s what introduced me to research. It was thanks to my post-doctoral mentor at University of California, San Francisco, that I was able to further hone my research interests. Both of these people were very influential and inspirational factors.

Broadly, how did you identify VEGF and identify its role?

I was interested in endocrinology and neuroendocrinology. The pituitary is the master regulator of many key physiological processes. During my fellowship at UCSF, I stumbled on a population of pituitary cells without an established function. As part of my postdoctoral work, I tried to characterize these cells. I found that they released a factor that promotes angiogenesis. Over time I was able to isolate this molecule: I named it vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). After that, and through the work of a number of other labs, it became clear that VEGF is a very important signaling molecule.

As your work progressed, what were your biggest challenges in translating your discoveries to the development of therapeutics?

We were very fortunate that we found the right target but the challenge was proving that. Initially there was a lot of controversy about angiogenesis. There was skepticism about VEGF’s role in angiogenesis; people thought that maybe there were other molecules at work. We had to prove our findings through sound scientific methods.

What factors have contributed to your success?

I have a medical background even though I have not been a practicing physician for a long time. Perhaps that medical background helped me to guide my research into an area that is therapeutically relevant. I was also just very fortunate that the VEGF molecule turned out to be so important. Being at Genentech for 22 years helped push my work along. I think it would have been difficult to do the same work in a different setting.

You recently received the 2011 Dr. Paul Janssen Award for your breakthrough research on VEGF, and in 2010 you received the Lasker Award. What do these awards mean to you?

They express the fact that my peers, my colleagues, respect this work, so that means a lot to me personally. But the awards also reflect on the work that my group has done over the years. To me, these awards are really a stimulus to do more. I see them as motivation to do more and better research.

What are your biggest research priorities right now?

We’re trying to follow up on our work on VEGF. We want to know why, for example, not all tumors respond to VEGF inhibitors. We want to understand resistance. This will mean dissecting tumors to refine our understanding of angiogenesis. Regarding pro-angiogenic therapies, clinical studies thus far have been quite disappointing. It’s very difficult to reconstruct complex vessels to positively impact circulation. It would be really wonderful if someone could figure out how to do that.

This story originally appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine.

The Role of Academic Medical Centers

Academic medical center must continue to bring together clinical and scientific resources, in the service of bettering humankind.

Published December 1, 2011

By Diana Friedman

“I don’t like the distinction between basic and translational science; science should be seamless,” says Laurie Glimcher, the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean, Weill Cornell Medical College, effective January 2012. Many of her colleagues in the academic medical center community support Glimcher’s viewpoint.

“No matter what we call the discovery and development of new therapeutic drugs, it’s critical for the future of patient care that we focus on breakthroughs in therapeutics,” says Kenneth L. Davis, president and CEO, Mount Sinai Medical Center.

For Glimcher, who spends the majority of her professional life in a laboratory, her training as a physician still informs her desire to translate laboratory discoveries into viable clinical treatments. This is the quintessential mission of an academic medical center: to bring together clinical and scientific resources, with a greater duty of service to humankind. This mission is further supported by the Bayh-Doyle Act, a federal mandate that requires academic medical centers to develop discoveries at the bench into benefits for patients, notes Glimcher.

In order to move translation forward, clinicians and scientists must interact. “We need great clinicians who understand how to interface with laboratory scientists, we need scientists to ask research questions that are relevant to disease, and we need bridges that connect the two groups,” says David S. Stephens, vice president for research, Woodruff Health Sciences Center, Emory University. “This happens in academic medical centers, but it doesn’t happen well in all of them.”

Medical Model of Choice

“We have never lived in a time when opportunities were greater in biomedical research,” says Davis. And, as pharmaceutical interests increasingly move from discovery to development, academic medical centers must play a leading role in seizing these opportunities.

Jeffrey Bluestone, executive vice chancellor and provost, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), believes that one way to greatly increase translation is to focus “our incredible science on humans as the complex medical model of choice.”

“To me, one of the most exciting post-human genome and technology advancements is thinking about the human organism as a place to do cutting-edge research, just like mice were our organism of choice in the past.” To do that, says Bluestone, academic medical centers will need to engage faculty and students in areas of human biology while improving existing infrastructure (data and tissue banks, bioinformatics technology, etc.) so that it is up to the task of human research.

Incentives Needed

Despite the incredible research opportunities afforded by an increase in scientific knowledge, academic medical centers face many challenges that make the realization of translation an uphill climb. Declining Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement leads to clinicians with packed patient schedules, leaving less time for vital collaboration with laboratory-based scientists, who are themselves faced with a dearth of research funds.

“Ninety-three percent of grants are turned down. A basic scientist will write their best grant in the area with which they are most comfortable and often that isn’t an area of disease,” says Davis. This underscores a critical need in academic medical centers: finding ways to incentivize both laboratory-based scientists and clinicians to spend more time working together and, ultimately, to make progress in creating new therapeutics for disease.

Many academic medical centers are providing incentives on an institutional level, by investing large amounts of financial and organizational resources to create physical spaces that support the day-to-day process of translation. For example, new buildings are being created at Weill Cornell Medical College and Mount Sinai Medical Center to foster closer collaboration between clinicians and laboratory-based scientists, blurring the lines between such disciplines to create the ‘seamless science’ of Glimcher’s vision.

Putting scientists and clinicians from diverse disciplines and backgrounds in close proximity to each other is useful both for its practicality and its ability to drive culture change. “Many of our faculty are used to, and very successful at, working independently or with a few collaborators,” says Bluestone. “We need to find ways to allow faculty to overcome barriers to communication and collaboration.” Having a building where scientists, clinicians, and students with varying degrees and areas of expertise work side-by-side is one way to facilitate a free exchange of information and ideas.

Reaching Out

In addition to new initiatives that pool intra-institutional resources, partnerships between academic medical centers are key, says Glimcher. “Here in New York, we have the so-called four corners—New York Presbyterian, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Weill Cornell Medical Center, and The Rockefeller University. We all have unique strengths, so we want to leverage those to avoid duplicating efforts. It’s more cost effective.”

At the Atlanta Clinical & Translational Science Institute (ACTSI), partnerships span three academic institutions—Emory University, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Georgia Institute of Technology—as well as a variety of health care and non-profit partners. All of these organizations pool resources “to rapidly and efficiently translate scientific discoveries to impact all populations of the Atlanta community,” says Stephens, who is the institute’s principal investigator.

Often, the results of these initiatives reach well beyond Atlanta. For example, ACTSI scientist Bali Pulendran recently published a systems biology approach to determine innate and adaptive responses to influenza vaccination, providing a new platform to predict vaccine immunogenicity and establishing new mechanistic insights for vaccine development.

Educating the Educators

Another way to incentivize both scientists and clinicians to expend more time and professional resources on the development of disease-modifying compounds is to provide professional education that emphasizes the skills necessary for translation. Some schools now offer master’s degrees in clinical sciences or translational science, in which physicians learn to become clinical researchers.

UCSF, a health sciences campus, recently developed ties with a local law school to help researchers learn about issues such as conflict of interest and consent forms. And ACTSI hosted a forum, in partnership with industry, to teach laboratory-based scientists about the process of creating a therapeutic product—an area most of those in attendance had never learned about before.

Such ties with industry are vital to avoiding the so-called valley of death—that stage where development of a previously promising compound languishes and dies—says Bluestone. “We need a different model of partnership with industry. Not one where industry licenses a drug from us and they tell us to go away, or one where industry provides us with money to do research and we tell them to go away.” At UCSF, Pfizer locates full-time scientists on the university campus, leading to greater interaction and better understanding of both sides of the process—discovery and development.

Industry collaboration is incredibly valuable, agrees Glimcher, provided there is full transparency from all sides. “In the olden days, basic scientists looked down on clinical researchers,” says Glimcher. “It’s not so different from how academics used to perceive industry. I believe those distinctions are largely being erased. Many of my esteemed colleagues have crossed over from academia to industry and vice versa. I think that’s a positive thing, so long as there’s transparency.”

A Unique Advantage

Indeed, collaboration, both within and outside of academia, is necessary to overcome translational hurdles. The potential rewards are great. But, says Bluestone, academic medical centers do not have to look beyond the borders of their campuses to find two of their most valuable resources: students and patients.

“Our students are tremendous resources that drive innovation and creativity,” says Bluestone. “They can help us challenge the status quo.”

At ACTSI, researchers interact regularly with community boards, set up to provide a forum for two-way communication and to engender trust between community members/patients and the institute. “The community boards allow us to reach out to communities about our research projects, but they also allow communities to contribute to us by telling us about their unmet clinical needs,” says Stephens.

Targeting research, and subsequent drug development, to unmet health needs is perhaps the best example of how academic medical centers can make a real-life difference through translation.

Also read:

A Medical Education Paradigm for the Future

A man in a suit and tie smiles for the camera.

George Thibault and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation help the Academy push progress around medical education for the public good.

Published September 1, 2011

By Noah Rosenberg

George Thibault knows as well as anyone that medicine is an ever-evolving frontier, continuously fraught with new challenges that demand innovative solutions. In fact, Thibault, president of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation and an Academy governor, is the first to admit that his medical school education at Harvard would, by itself, be insufficient in today’s medical world.

“Health care professionals,” he says, “now need different kinds of experience to prepare them for a very different world than the one I was prepared for when I finished my training.”

Thibault stresses that the health care system evolves so quickly that current health care professional training, in certain respects, is often obsolete by the time a graduate enters his or her chosen field. Factors such as the diversification of patient demographics, the rise of chronic disease, and the shift in care delivery from hospitals to community-based interventions make for a model in flux.

“Educational programs,” he insists, “need to catch up with those changes.”

Thibault and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, recently partnered with The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) to create the Translational Medicine Initiative. A three-year partnership that began in early 2010, the initiative fosters discussion and collaboration among physicians and basic researchers, industry and academic scientists, and public health experts, among others in the medical arena. The goal is to enable participants to learn from recent scientific breakthroughs, receive career development in translational medicine, and, ultimately, decrease the time needed to convert basic science into clinical applications.

Shaping the Future of Science

The partnership is accomplishing nothing less than helping to “shape the future education, research, and clinical care practices of thousands of physicians, scientists, and educators around the globe.” This is achieved through programs like the Translational Medicine Discussion Group—a forum for distributing information to the larger scientific and medical communities—and partnership-sponsored Academy memberships for medical school students and clinical fellows, which expose them to cutting-edge discoveries and enhance their delivery of care. Additionally, the Translational Medicine Initiative, whose findings are disseminated via simulcast webinars, multimedia eBriefings, podcasts, and articles in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, grants students access to the Academy’s Science Alliance events, which provide non-traditional career development opportunities.

The Translational Medicine Initiative, Thibault says, goes hand in hand with The Macy Foundation’s simple yet lofty goal: improving the health of the public through improving health professional education, a philosophy that was at the core of Thibault’s esteemed career as a Harvard physician and educator. He spent more than 40 years with the university, in posts including founding director of the Academy at Harvard Medical School and chief medical officer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and he has brought his educational values and beliefs with him to The Macy Foundation.

“We’re not abandoning what we’ve done before,” Thibault says of progress in the industry, “but we need to do more and improve upon it for this different health care system, delivery system, and patient population.”

“We’re building on the excellence of the past but adapting it to a changing world,” he says.

Creating a Healthier Society through Empowerment

After all, Thibault explains, the irony of medical training is that physicians traditionally spend most of their education alongside classmates in their particular specialty as opposed to those in complimentary fields with whom they will spend most of their careers.

“We think more of the educational process should be learning with and from other health professionals,” he says, noting that The Macy Foundation has received commitments from more than 15 schools and six major professional societies—including nursing and medicine— who recognize the importance of making joint-curriculum planning “the educational paradigm for the future.”

At the end of the day, however, Thibault is careful to note that while The Macy Foundation’s strategy has certainly adapted over the years, its core mission is as strong as ever: creating a healthier society by empowering the professionals who live and breathe medicine. “We don’t have enough resources ourselves to bring about the changes we want to see,” Thibault says, “so a large part is communicating ideas and getting others to pick up ideas. Ultimately, we have to go beyond what we alone as a foundation can do.” The Translational Medicine Initiative does just that, lending Academy resources to The Macy Foundation’s mission.

Also read: The Role of Academic Medical Centers

About the Author

Noah Rosenberg is a journalist in New York City.

To Build an Economic Engine: Overhaul Education

From rural one-room schoolhouse to Chancellor of the State University of New York, Nancy Zimpher has a diverse perspective on education.

Published May 1, 2011

By Marilynn Larkin

When Nancy Zimpher entered the one-room schoolhouse in the foothills of the Ozarks, she knew she was in trouble. “I was the sole teacher for four grades meshed into one classroom. The disconnect between how I had been prepared—as an English teacher—and what I was expected to do in the classroom couldn’t have been clearer,” Zimpher recalls.

“I hadn’t developed the disciplinary skills to stretch across that range of subjects. And I didn’t know as much as I needed to know about managing a classroom. I also didn’t know enough about how young people developed cognitively and emotionally and socially at different grade levels. And I didn’t know how to provide for students the kinds of extracurricular and home life assistance that were required in what we now call a ‘high-needs’ school.”

That experience, in the early 1970s, helped shape Zimpher’s career, which ultimately took her out of the classroom and into the spotlight as a passionate advocate and respected leader in transforming education for students as well as teachers. In her current role as Chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY), a post she accepted in 2009, Zimpher has continued her efforts to revitalize the educational system, focusing on New York State as a model for the nation.

Education Pipeline

“It’s not unusual for teachers to be teaching out of their depth and out of their discipline, often certified on some emergency basis to teach in some of the most challenging environments. This indicates that the supply chain is quite broken,” Zimpher says. “In terms of solutions, what started as a little ball rolling down the hill has become a huge issue that is coming together at this stage of my professional career through my work at SUNY, where we’re creating models that enable a very different approach to education.”

At the heart of Zimpher’s vision is an “education pipeline” that encompasses “everything people are learning at home and in schools, from the time they’re born through college graduation and as they pursue a career,” she explains. “We need to make a more connected pathway, supporting students not only in the classroom, but outside of school, in their families, in their neighborhoods, and in the whole social structure of our communities,” she says. This systemic approach is exemplified in two recent initiatives she spearheaded: Strive and the National Cradle to Career Network.

Strive, which Zimpher helped launch in Ohio when she was president of the University of Cincinnati, has since been adopted by a number of other cities across the United States, including Houston, Richmond, and Portland, Ore. The initiative brings together, among others, teachers, school district superintendents, college and university presidents, business leaders, and early childhood advocates—experts who usually work in their own “silos,” she says.

Working Across Sectors

By encouraging these individuals to work together across sectors, Strive aims to ensure that children are better prepared for school, supported inside and outside of school, succeed academically, enroll in some form of postsecondary education, graduate and embark on a career. Its most recent “report card” and other data how that in participating cities, Strive implementation has increased academic achievement, kindergarten preparedness, and college graduation rates.

The National Cradle to Career Network, launched in February 2011, is modeled after Strive, bringing together parents, teachers, administrators, and thought leaders from pre-kindergarten through higher education, as well as representatives from industry, community organizations, and government. For the prototype network, which is being developed in and around Albany, SUNY will collaborate with the Albany city school district, several regional SUNY campuses, and local governments and nonprofit organizations. Similar networks will soon be underway in Buffalo and in the borough of Brooklyn, in New York City.

“Clinical” Curriculum

Zimpher emphasizes that teachers “are in a practice-based Profession like doctors, nurses, and clinical psychologists, and they need a whole series of on-campus laboratory experiences, simulations, and video demonstrations to begin to understand the culture of specific schools and classrooms. Even when they’re sent out to a school to observe, they typically don’t know what to look for. Therefore, they cannot see.”

Convinced that clinical preparation should be the “centerpiece” of teacher education, Zimpher agreed to co-chair with former Colorado Commissioner of Education Dwight Jones the Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student Learning, convened by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education in November 2010.

In line with Zimpher’s approach, the expert panel called for teacher education to be “turned upside down” and refocused on clinical practice; as in the medical preparation model, “teachers, mentors, and coaches, and teacher interns and residents [will] work together as part of teams.” Stronger oversight by states and accreditation agencies is also recommended to ensure that teacher preparation programs become more accountable.

Thus far, New York, California, Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, Ohio, Oregon, and Tennessee have agreed to implement the panel’s recommendations.

Power of SUNY…and the Academy

Shortly after she came on board at SUNY, Zimpher launched a strategic plan, called The Power of SUNY, with the goal of making the university system an “economic engine” for New York State. Not surprisingly, a “seamless education pipeline” is a key objective. The plan highlights the increasing need for workers with knowledge and skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)—the very areas in which performance drops as students move from elementary school through high school.

SUNY is the largest higher education system in the United States, with more than 467,000 students on 64 campuses. Its breadth, scope, and potential are what drew Zimpher to her current post. “Over my 40 years in higher education, I’ve seen a great deal of innovation, but it all had the look of a cottage industry—boutique innovations that are very difficult to take to scale,” she says.

“I saw coming to SUNY as a one-of-a-kind opportunity to take innovation to scale at every level—in education, in the sciences, in art, and in healthcare. My greatest desire for an accomplishment is to realize the power of this complex, diverse system by implementing innovative ideas across multiple campuses.”

That aspiration propelled Zimpher to join The New York Academy of Sciences’ Board of Governors, largely because of the Academy’s “strong commitment to education and, in particular, to the STEM disciplines,” she says. “Linking SUNY’s many scientists, faculty, and graduate students to the Academy’s scientific community has the potential to yield mutual benefits on a huge scale.”

Global Affairs and Outreach

Zimpher also was attracted to the Academy’s international projects and connections. “These dovetail with our desire to better coordinate SUNY’s global affairs and outreach,” she explains. “Many people talk very vehemently about how America’s educational system lags behind those of other countries. Some of what ails our system is being taken care of in other systems.

Nevertheless, as word got out about our cradle-to-career partnerships, people in other countries learned about them on the web, and have begun to solicit our advice. So, I’m thinking that all educational systems around the world get pieces of the comprehensive picture right. But the whole picture—the need to imbue the education process with academic, cultural, and social investments in our future—is something that everybody is challenged with. And that means we have an opportunity to be a model.”

Zimpher’s passion for teaching and revamping the educational system has deep roots. Although her experience in the one-room schoolhouse was a precipitating factor, the foundation was laid much earlier. Her father was a principal in a Herndon, West Virginia, elementary school when he met her mother, who came from Kentucky to teach “commercial” classes in the local high school. “Commercial classes were taken mainly by women who were not college-bound,” Zimpher notes. “Ironically, though, these classes included the one subject that has the most value for us in the 21st century—keyboarding [typing].

“Another irony is that my mother placed students in cooperative internships in local businesses, and years later I learned that the city of Cincinnati was the founder of cooperative education, close to a hundred years ago,” Zimpher says. “And here I am now, working diligently to bring paid internships and cooperative education to scale in New York.”

About the Author

Marilynn Larkin is an independent health, medical, science editor and writer in New York City.

The Net Zero Energy Buildings of Tomorrow, Today

A large array of solar panels with tall buildings in the background.

With advances in engineering and energy procurement, the possibility of net zero energy buildings is more fruitful than ever.

Published March 1, 2011

By Jamie Kass

Image courtesy of 安琦王 via stock.adobe.com.

The green building community has made significant progress in designing and constructing energy neutral or ‘net-zero energy buildings’ (nZEBs), but these buildings are rare and are generally relatively low-intensity-use structures under 15,000 square feet. Now the community is developing strategies to scale up and to make the buildings more commonplace within the industry. On January 25, 2011, three speakers presented inspiring projects that are achieving new levels of sustainability in a challenging marketplace. They provided insights into metrics of success, best practices, trends, and prospects in the realm of low/net-zero energy building development.

Paul Torcellini, a commercial buildings researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), described the goals and vision that guided the design of the NREL–RSF (NREL–Research Support Facility) building. NREL preferred a design-build bid that would meet as many goals as possible from NREL’s list of priorities.

The energy goals held particular significance. According to Torcellini, the success of the NREL-RSF design-build process was that it provided performance-based guidelines rather than design solutions—thus allowing the design-build contractors to be creative and develop their designs within the performance guidelines. The resulting building, which represents a great step forward in the net-zero energy realm, was constructed with the budget typical for a regular office building. Most of that budget was spent on design and modeling rather than on construction.

Human Behavior: The “Final Frontier”

The value of such a front-loaded design process was echoed by Philip Macey who leads Haselden Construction’s sustainable building division. Macey noted that the design form and function of the NREL-RSF were modeled to meet the energy goal. This required designing the building’s components for synergistic roles and multiple uses. Macey explained that designing with a ‘multi-purpose’ concept for a building’s elements was not new: architects have been applying the same idea to work within space constraints, but the difference this time was that the constraint was an unequivocal and precise energy savings goal. Macey articulated that being goal-oriented from the beginning was crucial to maintaining control, achieving those goals, and reaching project completion within budget.

Bert Gregory, Chairman and CEO of Mithun, expanded the discussion to neighborhoods, which can offer benefits unavailable to single buildings. For instance, integrating water systems is better achieved at the district scale. Gregory outlined several sustainable urban design projects where the goals varied from carbon neutrality, to water neutrality, and, in the case of Mithun’s Lloyd Crossing project, to having a neighborhood that has an environmental footprint equivalent to that of a native Northwest forest by 2050. The Lloyd Crossing project aims to transform the Lloyd district study area, a 35-block area in Portland, Oregon, into an environmentally and financially sustainable community.

In all his examples, the goals and performance metrics were stated at the outset and were followed by the development of strategies to achieve these goals within constraints such as zoning regulations, electricity demand reduction capabilities, renewable energy generation capacity, resource recovery, governance models, financing, and human behavior. According to Gregory, when it comes to achieving the energy saving goals of demand-side management initiatives, human behavior is the “final frontier.”

Also read: Green Buildings and Water Infrastructure

The Need for Entrepreneurs in Advancing Science

Steve Hochberg has put The New York Academy of Sciences in the position to support life-science entrepreneurs and the impactful work they do.

Published March 1, 2011

By Adam Ludwig

Behind every medical technology breakthrough—whether it’s a new drug that improves everyday life or a novel device that revolutionizes a surgical procedure—lies years of painstaking research, testing, verification, and investment. Transforming ideas into potentially life-saving innovations involves a diverse set of players that can include student researchers, physicians, lawyers, government regulators, and entrepreneurs. This complex interplay relies on a cross-pollination of expertise that can find businesspeople donning lab coats and cardiologists polishing their dress shoes for a fundraising luncheon.

Steve Hochberg, a Board Governor for The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) and co-founder of 12 companies, believes entrepreneurial tenacity is the key to forging real-world applications from pure scientific ingenuity. He is co-founder of Ascent Biomedical Ventures, a company that has helped bring an impressive array of medical technologies and pharmaceuticals to market. Among the many products his firm has had a hand in developing: medical scaffolding for soft tissue repair, including tendons, hernias, and aneurisms; a minimally invasive cage for performing spinal fusions; and dermal absorption drug delivery techniques.

Hochberg has an impressive record of matching scientific ingenuity with money and management. Beyond being a generous donor to the Academy, throughout his four years serving as an Academy Governor, Hochberg has also been active in recruiting new board members and raising funds, and he wondered how the Academy could get involved in furthering innovation in the greater New York area. So when Milena Adamian, an interventional cardiologist with Wall Street and venture capital experience, contacted him with the idea of creating an angel network to fund biomedical companies in the pre-institutional-financing stage, Hochberg immediately suggested the Academy as a venue.

The Life Sciences Angel Network

Thanks in part to seed funding that he provided, the Academy’s Life Sciences Angel Network (LSAN) was launched in November 2010, with Adamian as Director and Hochberg chairing the Screening and Investment Committee. Together, they recruited physicians, academics, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and technical developers to serve on the Committee, which closely reviews each project before presenting it to LSAN’s group of angel investors.

Taking a cue from Hochberg’s work at Ascent, which produces safe and effective clinical data from new therapeutic ideas—with the ultimate goal of designing and implementing actual U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) trials—the Committee scrutinizes candidates’ viability for clinical, regulatory, and commercial success before presenting them to potential investors in this notoriously risky field.

Hochberg describes LSAN’s role as “bridging the gap between the napkin stage and the clinical testing stage,” with the scribbled-on napkin representing the earliest germ of an idea. A $500,000 to $2 million investment from LSAN’s angels can lead to further research, helping to attract the next-stage institutional investment of between $2 million and over $10 million necessary to facilitate clinical trials. In short, LSAN can get companies over the hump before they receive the kind of investment necessary to bring innovations to market.

Looking for Unmet Clinical Needs

Hochberg is happy to report that the first three companies to submit proposals to LSAN all received financing offers. “We are looking for unmet clinical needs,” he says. “That doesn’t always mean that there isn’t some existing therapy out there; just that it could be greatly improved on.” For example, he points to hypertension, where new approaches are needed for people who aren’t responding to existing drugs.

What excites Hochberg most is the possibility that a scientific meeting could be convened at the Academy to discuss a novel life-science question, and within months a company might get financing for an innovation that addresses this very question, with the entire process shepherded by the Academy. “There are a lot of stakeholders that make up the Academy network,” says Hochberg. “At the end of the day, we want to create great therapies using the science and technology that exists in New York.”

Hochberg would never call himself a “renaissance entrepreneur,” but in many ways the label fits. In addition to his on-the-job science training and his involvement in developing medical technology and care delivery, Hochberg is vice chair of Continuum Health Partners, a six-hospital health system in New York City. He is co-founder of the award-winning Evening Land Vineyards and has helped publish books on the medical implications of obesity and the benefits of the Mediterranean diet. He’s also a professional positive thinker. When asked about the long-term prospects for the Academy’s LSAN to foster life-changing innovation, he replies, “I’m a venture capitalist; I’m an optimist by virtue of what I do every day.”

Also read: What Happens When Innovative Scientists Embrace Entrepreneurship?

About the Author

Adam Ludwig is a writer in New York City.

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