Hosted by Korea Biotechnology Industry Organization (Korea BIO)
The MIT Industrial Liaison Program is pleased to present a track at the 2017 KoreaBIOplus Global Conference in Seoul, Korea on Monday, October 23.
With a focus on the MIT innovation ecosystem and its impact on life science, the track will explore key advances in biotechnology from personalized medicine to the rapid development of personalized medical devices. In addition, the track will feature presentations from innovative MIT-connected startups. Join MIT faculty to engage in valuable dialogue, gain practical insights, and learn about cutting-edge advances in biotechnology.
Karl Koster is the Executive Director of MIT Corporate Relations. MIT Corporate Relations includes the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and MIT Startup Exchange.
In that capacity, Koster and his staff work with the leadership of MIT and senior corporate executives to design and implement strategies for fostering corporate partnerships with the Institute. Koster and his team have also worked to identify and design a number of major international programs for MIT, which have been characterized by the establishment of strong, programmatic linkages among universities, industry, and governments. Most recently these efforts have been extended to engage the surrounding innovation ecosystem, including its vibrant startup and small company community, into MIT's global corporate and university networks.
Koster is also the Director of Alliance Management in the Office of Strategic Alliances and Technology Transfer (OSATT). OSATT was launched in Fall 2019 as part of a plan to reinvent MIT’s research administration infrastructure. OSATT develops agreements that facilitate MIT projects, programs and consortia with industrial, nonprofit, and international sponsors, partners and collaborators.
He is past chairman of the University-Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP), an organization that seeks to enhance the value of collaborative partnerships between universities and corporations.
He graduated from Brown University with a BA in geology and economics, and received an MS from MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to returning to MIT, Koster worked as a management consultant in Europe, Latin America, and the United States on projects for private and public sector organizations.
Director, MIT Corporate Relations
Jewan John Bae comes to MIT Corporate Relations with more than 20 years of experience in the specialty chemicals and construction industries. He facilitates fruitful relationships between MIT and the industry, engaging with executive level managers to understand their business challenges and match them with resources within the MIT innovation ecosystem to help meet their business objectives.
Bae’s areas of expertise include new product commercialization stage gate process, portfolio management & resource planning, and strategic planning. He has held various business leadership positions at W.R. Grace & Co., the manufacturer of high-performance specialty chemicals and materials, including Director of Strategic Planning & Process, Director of Sales in the Americas, and Global Strategic Marketing Director. Bae is a recipient of the US Army Commendation Medal in 1986.
John Roberts has been Executive Director of MIT Corporate Relations (Interim) since February 2022. He obtained his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at MIT and returned to the university after a 20-year career in the pharmaceutical industry, joining the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) in 2013. Prior to his return, John worked at small, medium, and large companies, holding positions that allowed him to exploit his passions in synthetic chemistry, project leadership, and alliance management while growing his responsibilities for managing others, ultimately as a department head. As a program director at MIT, John built a portfolio of ILP member companies, mostly in the pharmaceutical industry and headquartered in Japan, connecting them to engagement opportunities in the MIT community. Soon after returning to MIT, John began to lead a group of program directors with a combined portfolio of 60-80 global companies. In his current role, John oversees MIT Corporate Relations which houses ILP and MIT Startup Exchange.
MIT Startup Exchange actively promotes collaboration and partnerships between MIT-connected startups and industry. Qualified startups are those founded and/or led by MIT faculty, staff, or alumni, or are based on MIT-licensed technology. Industry participants are principally members of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP).
MIT Startup Exchange maintains a propriety database of over 1,500 MIT-connected startups with roots across MIT departments, labs and centers; it hosts a robust schedule of startup workshops and showcases, and facilitates networking and introductions between startups and corporate executives.
STEX25 is a startup accelerator within MIT Startup Exchange, featuring 25 “industry ready” startups that have proven to be exceptional with early use cases, clients, demos, or partnerships, and are poised for significant growth. STEX25 startups receive promotion, travel, and advisory support, and are prioritized for meetings with ILP’s 230 member companies.
MIT Startup Exchange and ILP are integrated programs of MIT Corporate Relations.
Charles Fracchia is founder and CEO at BioBright, a company building smart laboratory tools to improve reproducibility in biomedical research. BioBright has been featured in Scientific American, the innovators under 35 in MIT Tech Review, BioIT World, and SLAS. Fracchia did his graduate work between the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Medical School and obtained his BSc from Imperial College London.
Fracchia has presented his work at venues including the White House, MIT Sloan, NASA Ames, IBM Research, Airbus, O'Reilly and SciFoo. Over the years, the work has been sponsored by DARPA, NSF, Alphabet's X (formerly Google X), Knight Foundation, and Templeton Foundation.
Every year, up to $28 billion per year are wasted to reproducibility issues in biomedical research. The lack of reproducibility is a major factor that contributes to making drug development so time and capital intensive: 10 years & $1 billion. BioBright has developed smart laboratory technology that helps pharmaceutical and biotech companies shorten the time to market by helping them detect errors faster and cheaper. In this talk, we will discuss how BioBright has used its technology to improve the precision of a critical workflow by more than 20x and
Thanos Kosmidis received his MEng in Computing from Imperial College (UK), his MS in Information Networking from Carnegie Mellon University (USA), and has been an Advanced Study Fellow at MIT’s Sloan School of Management (USA).
He has 20 years of experience in the technical and commercial divisions of high-tech companies in USA and Europe. His last post, which he left to build CareAcross, was that of deputy director at a large telecommunications' firm strategic commercial planning department.
He has solid experience in managing multiple local and remote teams, including growing a team of 5 to reach 180 people across three countries and five timezones. He has led multimillion dollar projects from inception to delivery, and is experienced in the full lifecycle of products and services.
Mr. Kosmidis is an active member of the international Health 2.0 organisation promoting the application of technology in healthcare, and a frequently invited speaker and presenter at international conferences in digital health.
Finally, Mr. Kosmidis is serving as a Assembly Member for the European Commission’s “Mission on Cancer”, and as a technology expert for the European Commission Initiative on Breast Cancer (ECIBC), and the Quality Assurance Scheme Development Group (QASDG) in particular.
CareAcross is a digital health company focusing on cancer. It offers personalized services to patients through an online, private and secure platform: information based on the latest research, support from an online community, advice from experts, as well as interactive and personalized tools to help them manage their daily lives. These services are free for patients. Based on their interaction and anonymized data, we provide advanced services to the industry, including clinical trial recruitment, patient support programs and real-world evidence.
Xinjie (Jeff) Zhang, Ph.D., Dr. Zhang is a highly motivated and dedicated materials expert with 20+ years industry research and development expertise on nanomaterials. His vision has been the driving force of this high tech startup, and his passion has pushed and will push the technologies forward till the complete and successful commercialization of these unprecedented membrane products. Dr. Zhang has been very successful in fundamental and applied research as well as their commercialization. Dr. Zhang is the inventor of 13 issued and 3 pending patents and the author of 15 peer-reviewed journal publications. His R&D work from 1992 to 1996 at Research Institute of Petroleum Processing (RIPP) led to the building of a new chemical factory - Nanjing Jinlong Chemical Company in 1996. Dr. Zhang was awarded a “Scientific and Technical Progress Award” in 1996 (a ministerial award in recognition for significant contribution to scientific and technological progress to Chinese chemical and petroleum industry) for his outstanding work. His R&D work from 2001 to 2003 led to three issued US patents, and the resultant technology has been licensed to Iowa Corn Promotion Board (514087). His R&D work from 2003 to 2010 in a leading carbon nanotube manufacturing company, Hyperion Catalysis, led to two issued US patents, and these works significantly strengthen the leadership of Hyperion Catalysis in carbon nanotube industry. His most recent work focused on the preparation, characterization and applications of one-dimensional ceramic nanomaterials due to their extreme preparation challenges and great commercial potential. Dr. Zhang is the technical founder of Novarials and will continuously lead the technical projects of the Company.
Novarials was founded to pursue the dream of using one-dimensional nanomaterials to make revolutionary products and thus improve human life. Our core competency is the capability to produce rationally designed and high-quality ceramic nanowires, as well as high performance nanowire membranes. Our Bendable Ceramic Paper Membrane technology is an industry-changing technology, and will pose paramount impacts to dozens of industries including energy conversion and storage, chemicals, gas and oil, automobiles, food, beverage, biotech, pharmaceutical industries, waste treatment, and environmental protection. Novarials has realized the proprietary production of several important ceramic nanowires including titania nanowires and alumina nanowires. Right now we are focusing their membrane formation including titania nanowire membranes and alumina nanowire membranes for their specific commercial applications including western blotting and high safety battery separators. A strong team with various expertise including two nanomaterials experts, four renowned advisers, one membrane expert, and one materials engineer has been formed at Novarials in order to fully develop these unprecedented membrane technologies and quickly bring these novel products into the commercial marketplace.
GwangPyo Ko is the founder and CEO at KoBioLabs, Inc. a company developing therapeutics using human microbiomes.
He is also a Professor of BioMax/N-Bio and Graduate School of Public Health at Seoul National University (SNU), an editorial board member of Scientific Reports (journal from the publishers of Nature), a representative Korean PI & board member of International Human Microbiome Consortium, and a head of Human Microbiome Center at SNU.
He was a visiting scientist of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard (2011-2012). He obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees at SNU in the school of biological science, and Doctoral Degree at Harvard University. He carried out his postdoctoral research training at Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then became an assistant professor at Univ. of Texas Science Center at Houston. He had returned to Korea to be a professor at SNU in 2005 and founded KoBioLabs, Inc. in 2014.
KoBioLabs, Inc. is a bioventure developing medical foods, therapeutics based on human microbiome, and companion diagnostics. KoBioLabs, Inc has established a microbiome biobank of over 5,000 microbial isolates and their metadata from over 2,500 Korean subjects and well-structured in vitro & in vivo mining platform for microbiome-derived functional candidates using metagenomics & metabolomics. KoBiolabs, Inc. is now developing science based medical foods and novel therapeutics over many disease areas.
KoBioLabs, Inc. is the leading bioventure in the field of microbiome therapeutics. KoBioLabs, Inc is the spin-off company from Seoul National University and established a microbiome biobank of over 5,000 microbial isolates and their metadata from over 2,500 Korean subjects and well-structured in vitro & in vivo mining platform for microbiome-derived therapeutic candidates using functional metagenomics & metabolomics. The talk will present current microbiome therapeutic pipelines over many diseases such as inflammatory bowel diseases
Carlos Boto co-founded doDOC in 2015 and serves as Chief Operations and Sales Officer.
doDOC is helping pharmaceutical companies bring new medical products to market faster by turning highly complex documentation processes into simple and transparent collaborative tasks.
With an executive engineering background and specialization in computer science, research and entrepreneurship, Carlos has also a track in management. Carlos is the inventor of a patented light-activable nanoformulation, with applications spanning from research to therapeutic medicine worldwide. He has been responsible for project management of international initiatives for several years, having successfully managed multidisciplinary teams from 27 different nationalities and based on 32 different organizations.
Carlos received his PhD in Engineering Systems from MIT MPP, in collaboration with University of Salamanca (Spain), University College London (UK) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine (China). His BS and MS degrees in Materials Engineering are from the University of Coimbra (Portugal).
doDOC takes highly complex documentation processes and turns them into simple and transparent collaboration tasks. doDOC helps global enterprises to do more business and make better decisions by unlocking the power of information doDOC is a collaborative information authoring and management platform, and is the solution to complexities and inefficiencies in planning, drafting, editing, reviewing, and approving complex professional documents within your organization to leverage the true power of data as a decision-making tool. doDOC creates high value by streamlining document workflows, leading to faster drafting, review and approval, instant perfect formatting, and transparent project management lifecycle. The net results of integrating doDOC in the information processes of a company are automatic compliance, cost and risk reduction, and powerful insights of performance, productivity, and quality.
Mike Brunnick is the SVP of Global Sales and Customer Success at Luminoso Technologies, an AI-based natural language understanding company. He is responsible for putting Luminoso's solutions into the hands of customers everywhere, through our own Account Executives and our growing network of partners. Before joining Luminoso, Mike held a variety of sales and services leadership positions including VP of Sales and Customer Success at Socialware and VP of Federal Sales for HP Software. Mike also served on active duty for the United States Marine Corps and was awarded the Bronze Star with Combat “V” for actions during Desert Storm. Mike has a BA in Russian Studies from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.
Bryan Kaanta is the APAC Regional Representative and Sales Engineer at Luminoso Technologies, an AI-based natural language understanding company. At Luminoso, he is responsible for selling and developing solutions for APAC-based companies as well as growing our network of partners. Bryan previously served on active duty for the United States Air Force as a developmental engineer at the Air Force Research Labs with published papers in algorithm development. Bryan has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an MBA from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA.
Luminoso Technologies is a leading natural language understanding company that enables clients to rapidly discover value in their unstructured data. Luminoso’s award-winning software applies artificial intelligence to accurately analyze text-based data in any industry without lengthy setup time or training. Companies use the insights that Luminoso’s solutions uncover to streamline their contact center processes, monitor brand perception, and optimize the customer experience. Luminoso’s software is flexible and can be deployed in either a standalone Cloud or an On-Premise solution, or integrated into an end-to-end platform via the API. Unstructured data can be natively analyzed in 13 languages, including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Arabic. Luminoso is privately held with headquarters in Cambridge, MA. For more information, please visit www.luminoso.com.
The Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) is industry’s most comprehensive portal to MIT, enabling companies worldwide to harness MIT resources to address current challenges and to anticipate future needs. The ILP helps company executives monitor MIT research developments, identify MIT resources of interest, arrange expert face-to-face meetings with MIT faculty, advise on research sponsorship and technology licensing opportunities, and link member companies to MIT-connected startups.
Mark Bathe is a Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT, Director of the MIT New Engineering Education Transformation, Member of the Harvard Medical School Initiative for RNA Medicine, and Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. He obtained his Doctoral Degree at MIT working in the Departments of Mechanical, Chemical, and Biological Engineering before moving to the University of Munich as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow to carry out his postdoctoral research in Biological Physics. He returned to MIT in 2009 to join the faculty in the Department of Biological Engineering, where he runs an interdisciplinary research group focused on engineering nucleic acids for application to vaccines, therapeutics, structural biology, and computing. He is academic co-founder of Cache DNA, Inc. and Kano Therapeutics, Inc., and in his free time he enjoys running, biking, swimming, and skiing amongst other outdoor activities.
Personalized medicine is on the brink of a revolution due to the convergence of low-cost whole genome sequencing and powerful new gene editing and augmentation technologies. Patient-based genome sequencing offers the ability to genetically profile acquired diseases such as cancer, as well as inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis. And CRISPR and synthetic messenger RNAs offer the ability to either edit or augment specific genes to cure or alter the developmental course of these deadly diseases. This is in contrast to small molecule drugs that have predominated therapeutics to date, typically with highly toxic side effects, such as in the case of chemotherapeutics, or long-term dependencies, as in the case of statins and related medications. However, targeting organs and cells for therapeutic delivery of CRISPR and messenger RNAs remains a major bottleneck for the advancement of gene therapies to the clinic due to their large size and highly negative charge. In order to realize a next-generation therapeutic delivery platform for these potentially revolutionary nucleic-acid-based drugs, our laboratory is developing structured DNA and RNA nanoparticles that offer the ability to mimic viruses in their encapsulation and targeting of genes highly specifically to cells and tissues. In contrast to viruses, however, our nucleic acid nanoparticles are purely synthetic and therefore offer the ability to chemically functionalize as well as alter their sequence composition for use in therapeutic targeting, encapsulation or protection, programmed release, and as vaccine adjuvants for cancer, infectious and auto-immune diseases.
Alexander Slocum is the Walter and Hazel May Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He has 130+ patents and has helped develop 12 products that have received R&D 100 awards for “one of the one hundred best new technical products of the year”. He has helped start several successful precision manufacturing equipment companies and has a passion for working with industry to solve real problems and identify fundamental research topics. For the past decade his prime focus has been on renewable energy systems.
Healthcare consumes a great and growing percentage of the world’s GDP, which presents a problem and thus opportunity. Innovation in patient care requires both clinical and technical skills, and this talk presents the methods and outcomes from MIT course 2.75 Medical Device Design which since 2005 has used clinical-academic collaboration to develop and evaluate new medical device technologies, while teaching fundamentals of mechanical and electrical engineering design. Together, over the course of a single semester, seniors, graduate students and clinicians conceive, design, build and test proof-of-concept prototypes. Projects initiated in the course have generated intellectual property and peer-reviewed publications, stimulated further research, furthered student and clinician careers, and resulted in many publications, technology licenses and start-up ventures. Examples of current products and startups will be presented as short case studies.
Executive Director MIT Professional Education
Bhaskar Pant is the Executive Director of MIT Professional Education, the arm of MIT that provides technical professionals a gateway to MIT expertise via education courses and programs designed for them. More than 1,500 professionals from over sixty countries arrive on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, every summer to attend courses of a diverse set of technical disciplines. In addition, over 10,000 professionals worldwide are now attending MIT’s online professional courses that include topics such as Big Data. MIT Professional Education is also offering select MIT courses in locations in Asia, Latin America, and Europe
Prior to joining MIT, Mr. Pant held several leadership positions such as serving as Managing Director, Asia Pacific, for the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the world’s foremost academic testing organization headquartered in Princeton, N.J. As managing director, he was responsible for overseeing the company’s English language testing operations throughout Asia. This included the opening of a subsidiary in China that administered the TOEIC English proficiency test for engineers and other working professionals in the nation.
Previously, Mr. Pant led the global corporate training arm of the World Learning Graduate Institute in Vermont and held senior management positions at media and media technology companies such as Sony Corporation and Turner Broadcasting/CNN. Mr. Pant was the first President of Turner Broadcasting’s subsidiary in India.
Mr. Pant holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Rochester and a graduate degree in communications and management from Indiana University in Bloomington. Besides managing MIT Professional Education, Mr. Pant teaches intercultural communication to engineering students at MIT and management students at the Harvard University Extension School.
MIT is world renowned for its undergraduate and graduate degree programs in engineering and other technical disciplines. Mr. Pant will explain how professionals around the world can access MIT expertise and knowledge without necessarily having to enroll in a degree program at MIT. MIT Professional Education offers a variety of certificate programs taught by MIT faculty on MIT campus, online and in international locations, for working professionals searching for advanced knowledge from MIT.