IIT AGNE sponsored and conducted an event on November 14, 2015 at the Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT to welcome new students to the Boston area. Raj Laad, Raj Melville and Vijay Kumar from IIT AGNE welcomed the new students and outlined plans for the Leadership Conference 2016, which is being organized by IIT AGNE, from August 12-14, 2016 at the Rhode Island Convention Center.

A panel of leading healthcare entrepreneurs, spanning lifesciences, biomedical and biotechnology, convened to discuss entrepreneurial opportunities for students starting their careers in the field.

The panel consisted of Parag Mehta, CEO, Aveta Biomics, PJ Anand, Founder and CEO, Alcyone Lifesciences, Purnanand Sarma, President & CEO, Taris Biomedical and Niven Narain, Co-founder, President and CTO, Berg; conducted a lively discussion that focused on the economics of drug and treatment development process, future directions in healthcare and where opportunities lie. The panel conducted an engaging discussion with the audience, which consisted of students and members of the community.

There is an ongoing revolution in the pharmaceutical industry as healthcare moves towards value and outcome based payment, where insurance companies and governments will pay to get patients back to a productive and normal life in as short a time as possible. Entrepreneurs need to look for opportunities by holistic examination of the entire cost structure and finding significant targets for cost reduction and improved outcome, since drug costs account for only 15% of the overall costs.

Parag Mehta indicated, in framing the discussion, increasing number of healthcare dollars are being spent of preventive care, and under the new Affordable Care Act mandate it is only going to grow. Scientifically, he felt that approaches using multi-target therapies are likely to provide better outcomes.

Niven Narain of Berg, who pioneered the use of big data and analytics in healthcare made the point that there is going to be increasing use of machine learning, big data and computational power to draw Bayesian inferences for specific patients and patient populations (phenotypes) to predict treatment and drug efficacy.This will enable firms to fail fast to determine approaches that do not work before spending hundreds of milllions of dollars on Phase 2 and 3 trials.

Purnanand Sarma pointed out that most drug development is focused on the United States, while the rest of the world is underserved. Even if a successful drug is developed for US populations, it may work differently for Indian or other populations as the phenotypes differ significantly, as Niven Narain also pointed out. He pointed out the high incidence of bladder cancer due to infection in the Middle East and significant increase in cancer and lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and poor cardiovascular health in Indian communities, though the Indian population has lower measures of obesity.

P J Anand related his experience and explained that there are a number of innovative financing models. While traditionally, venture capital has been the source of funding, it is also possible to tap into other sources of funding including large investment funds but he asked the entrepreneurs to have a clear value proposition in terms of pharmacenconomics.

The audience asked a number of questions focused on raising funds for drug development and the FDA approval process. The panel pointed out that the FDA is promoting innovation and is under pressure by advocacy groups. Indeed, most of them do not factor in FDA approval, because promising treatments for critical diseases are always considered favorably. While venture capitalists play a critical role in vetting new ideas, it is critical to engage those organization and individuals who feel passionately about the idea. In addition, it is important to have a focused dollarized cost savings story in order to get attention from financial backers.

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