The 2023 Class of the Bridging Academia and Industry educational program concluded last month with a project competition featuring six teams of investigators.

Each team pitched their challenge-driven research projects to senior teaching faculty and leadership from academia and biopharma, medical device and venture industries.

A total of 19 investigators participated in this year’s program, representing a range of departments and scientific interests from across Massachusetts General Hospital and Mass Eye and Ear.

Since the program launched in 2019, a total of 96 investigators have participated from 18 departments (at Mass General, Mass Eye and Ear and Spaulding) and all five thematic research centers at Mass General.

The projects pitched this year included new strategies to address challenges in respiratory therapy, postpartum depression, neuromuscular diseases, chronic inflammatory diseases, melanoma and heart disease.

Timothy Gaulton, MD, MSc and Susana Vacas, MD, PhD, from the Department of Anesthesia, Pain Medicine and Critical Care, won the project competition award for their project: LungLife: Empowering the World to Breathe.

LungLife is novel, safe, tolerable, and affordable breathing system that delivers continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP).

2023 Bridging Academia and Industry Competition Teams and Projects

About the Educational Program

The class of 2023 is the fifth class to go through the Bridging Academia and Industry educational program, which is co-directed by Gabriela Apiou, PhD, Director of Strategic Alliances for the Mass General Research Institute, and Bob Tepper, MD, Partner, Third Rock Ventures, and member of the Research Institute Advisory Council.

A key pillar of the Longfellow Project, Bridging Academia and Industry is a 15-week-long program taught and mentored by more than 60 expert faculty, leaders from academia and the biopharmaceutical, medical device and venture industries.

“This course is about establishing a new culture and field of investigation,” Apiou says. “Inspiring the trainees to enter the field of translational sciences; learning the academia-industry language; and understanding what it really takes to go from an idea in the lab to a diagnostic or treatment are our overarching goals.”

It begins with a course on the strategies and tactics of translation and culminates in the challenge-driven project competition with a $150,000 award for the winning team.

The course covers Fundamentals of Translation, Research and Development (Therapeutics, Diagnostics, Intellectual Property), Business Development and Commercialization (Go-to-Market Planning, Exit Strategies) and Translation Stories (Therapeutics, Diagnostics).

For the project competition, all faculty trainees give an elevator pitch presentation of the most important problem (biology, technology, medicine) their research aims to solve in front of a panel of select project competition faculty. All problems are discussed and aggregated into broad scientific and medical themes, and project teams are formed.

“Witnessing today’s presentations and the incredible work behind it made me realize why we’re so fortunate to work in Mass General, because there’s no place in the world where you can find so many novel ideas presented so well, so cogently and with such passion,” said Maurizio Fava, MD, at the conclusion of this year’s competition. “At the end of the day all those ideas are aimed at making a difference for our patients.”

Fava, chief of the Department of Psychiatry at Mass General and the incoming chair of the Executive Committee on Research, served as a faculty Project Competition mentor for one of the teams and participated in the selection of the winning team.

About the Mass General Research Institute
Research at Massachusetts General Hospital is interwoven through more than 30 different departments, centers and institutes. Our research includes fundamental, lab-based science; clinical trials to test new drugs, devices and diagnostic tools; and community and population-based research to improve health outcomes across populations and eliminate disparities in care.
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