Cracking Cancer 2.0 - Introductory Remarks

SPEAKER: The next speaker I'd like to welcome up onto stage is Anne Deconnick, director of the Koch Institute, because as you will imagine, pulling off cracking cancer at MIT is impossible without the Koch Institute. So I'd like her to get a microphone, please, and share with us just a couple of seconds, observations about how you see this event, how you got engaged, and what's your thoughts of the day.

ANNE DECONNICK: Hello. Oh, yes, this is on. Hi. I'm Anna Deconnick. I am the executive director, not the director. That's my boss, Tyler Jacks. [LAUGHS] Don't tell him you confused him with me. [LAUGHS] I've been at MIT for 15 years. And this year, these past few years have definitely been amongst the most exciting years I could have imagined in cancer research. So it's really exciting to be here today.

I think many of you might already know the story of the Koch Institute, but bear with me for two minutes. I will use my two minutes in part for that. Back in 19 early '70s, President Nixon declared war on cancer. And he launched a request for applications from universities to start National Cancer Institute designated units. And MIT threw its hat into the ring and became one of seven basic National Cancer Institute designated centers in America. We don't have patients in the clinic, as you know, but we have a whole lot of MIT-ness in us, including lots of entrepreneurs.

For 30 years, have about 12 faculty members from the Department of Biology roam the hallways. Five of them, Nobel Prize winners. So not too shabby of a history. Of course, none of you were born yet. I was, but I wasn't aware of things. [LAUGHS]

And then about 2000, Tyler Jacks became director, then Susan Hockfield became president at MIT. And he convinced her his building needed some updates, betterment. And she said, "Why don't I give you a new building? And why don't I double it in size? And we will add an equal number of engineers and try a whole very MIT approach to cracking cancer" or tackling cancer, whatever you want to call it.

And so there we are. The Koch Institute was founded about 10 years ago. Half of our faculty, biologists, half of them from the various engineering departments at MIT, all together under one roof fighting this joint mission of cancer.

And so then the question became well, how are we going to make this work? How do we make sure these people talk to each other? How do we come more than the sum of our parts? And then once we think we have become more than the sum of our parts, how do we measure that? How do we measure impact?

Of course, we can look at our trainees, and we see them starting companies and presenting at events like this today, which of course, is a wonderful way to say we're doing well. They go start labs, they become directors of other NCI designated cancer centers. Again, you know we're doing well.

Publications. We can count publications. MIT did a study. We didn't even know they were doing it. They looked at all the departments, lab, and centers at MIT to see which was the most collaborative, which ones had the most multi faculty applications. And the Koch Institute was number one. Not exactly surprised, but still pretty pleased with that result.

And then to really-- for me, my favorite sort of way to measure impact is related to today. And that is the start ups that have come out of the Koch Institute. We're a very small center really compared to the one across the street, Dana Farber-- [INAUDIBLE] I mean. The Dana Farber Harvard Cancer Center with 1,100 members. We have about 50 right now. We've been growing over the years.

Of those 50 faculty, in the past 10 years, together they have launched more than 60 companies. And that is a really impressive number. And over a dozen of those are in the clinic now really cracking cancer, I think. And so today, it's really exciting to see that at least half of the companies are being run by dear old friend, trainees that are doing well, that are changing the world and making a difference for patients. And so I'm really glad to be here. I'm excited to hear from everyone this afternoon. And I hope you enjoy your morning. Thank you.

SPEAKER: I'll remind ourselves why we are in this room because Anne said the history of the Koch Institute isn't very long. But some of you will know the history of the startup exchange is also not very long, which is actually quite surprising, right? Because you would think that hand and mind together at MIT and start ups would go very well together. And in fact, they do. And there is an enormous amount of activity. In fact, obviously, crossing domains. Today, I think we'll be straddling many of these topics on this charge, which wasn't really designed just for a cracking cancer concept. It's more presents all the kinds of topics that people come to us from all these other member companies, some of whom are represented in the audience today.

But anyway, it is interesting to observe that we have only been going with startup exchange for three years. Proceeding that was 75 years of the Industrial Liaison Program. Now, what does that mean? It means that something is changing clearly in the way that industry and academia is approaching startup innovation. So we are clearly much closer.

One of the things when I was brought in to think about how to build this out that really surprised me was that we actually didn't have kind of at the macro level at MIT a structure to really put in place collaboration between start ups and large companies. There were many, many smaller programs that had mentoring or teaching or even giving faculty grants as their main mandate. But there were very few that had this partnership and crossing boundaries as mandate.

So that's really what we ended up focusing on. And I think as you will see throughout this morning-- well, if we don't succeed when only the right players are in the room, when will we succeed? So I mean, I really don't think there are a lot of people in this room that don't belong to any of the main target categories for partnership.

And I want to point out that we don't put on this event just for you to have fun and drink coffee. This is serious work. The breaks are serious work. You know, people laugh at this, but we're here to make a big difference in cracking cancer and in bringing start ups and corporations and university closer together.

We did over 600 introductions last year. But I don't want you to focus on that number. Our target for next year is that the success rate of those introductions is going to increase. We're now targeting-- I'm not going to go out with the number, but it's a very high number for these basic introductions. If you are a corporation, and you meet with a startup, and we both have agreed, or the three of us have agreed-- the startup, the industry, partner, and us have agreed this is a good meeting, there will be an outcome. That is my expectation.

Now, when this works, we see things like WiTricity in a different field, electric charging of vehicles, partnering with IHI, a very big Japanese conglomerate. Wonderful things can happen. We also have an accelerator program that's not so much represented here today, but where we pick out of the 1,500 start ups we work with, we pick the top 25 at any given moment. And we have a rolling entry several times a year to keep it fresh.

And it's very exciting. We actually have our first sort of pre-launch symposium meeting this afternoon. The six new start ups haven't even been announced yet. But we're continuously refreshing this portfolio, and these are very, very exciting companies indeed.