Innovation in Manufacturing Biomedicines: From New Modalities to Scalable, Accessible Therapeutics Stacy Springs Executive Director, MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation (CBI)
Biologic medicines (e.g., monoclonal antibodies, gene and cell therapies, vaccines) are critical to treating and preventing disease. Recent regulatory approvals of exciting new biomedicines such as cell and gene therapies provide new hope to patients who have exhausted alternative therapies or suffer from a rare disease with no other treatment. To help patients access these medicines, biopharmaceutical companies must be able to manufacture very complex molecules safely, reliably, and in the quantities needed, which can range from the very large (industrialized) scale to the very small (personalized) scale. This presentation will review the challenges in manufacturing these complex biologic medicines as well as approaches to modernization of biomanufacturing with the goal of providing broadened access to biologic medicines. Dr. Springs will describe multiple approaches that MIT’s Center for Biomedical Innovation and collaborators are taking to achieve this goal, including continuous manufacturing, novel purification strategies, novel analytical technologies for assessing novel product quality attributes, and rapid methods for sterility and viral safety assessment.
SMEs are the backbone of most economies and employ approximately 60 percent of the working population in OECD countries. However, these businesses often struggle the most to access financing, oftentimes, relying on friends and family to help them flourish and thrive by lending money when others do not. We have created Trust·u to offer a solution to this. Trust·u is an internal venturing effort from BBVA, positioned to address innovation opportunities in an agile manner by mimicking startups. We utilize a digital platform to enable rapid on-boarding and underwriting, combining social elements with financial data, to grant small businesses access to financing based on a new risk assessment model, which takes full advantage of ML techniques and new data sources.
Redefining Small Business Lending through ML and Social Physics.
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Principal Investigator Alan Oppenheim
Achieving long-term climate stabilization targets that limit warming to 1.5oC or 2oC requires deep decarbonization, with total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions eventually falling to net zero. Because some emissions in the economy are difficult to eliminate, most 1.5oC or 2oC pathways rely on negative emissions strategies to offset residual positive GHG emissions in hard-to-abate sectors. Among carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and natural-climate solutions such as afforestation and reforestation (A/R) are among the most widely considered options. The deployment of these options will depend on their availability as well as the climate policy regime, particularly the availability of international emissions trading. In fact, CDR and international trade in GHG permits mutually reinforce each other. This relationship and its implications for the scale of CDR and emissions trading, regional deployment, carbon prices, and GDP will be discussed in this talk.