M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Date: February - April 2008
Duration: 0 / 16:48
At this point I would like to officially open the course.
Thank you very much for coming. This is supposed to be fun and
exciting. What we are trying to do is just stimulate innovation,
creativity, start up companies, new deals. I want you to go home
like I do, I'm a little crazy, so I want you to be a little crazy
too. I want you to go home and think about, dream about your new
company and what else you could do. Once you get bitten by that
entrepreneurship bug, it's gonna follow you all over the life and
everything you're gonna do in life, you're gonna see something you can
improve. You sit in the car, the cup holder's not very good,
you're gonna think about how to create a new company that creates
better cup holders; things like that. So I really want to
stimulate you with that course to start thinking about these things and
what you can do with your life and maybe there's another life next your
science and medicine that you're doing. Okay? So what we're
gonna do first, every speaker, I need to introduce myself and the
cohost, and we're gonna do this in a second. I myself, why do I
think I'm maybe the right guy to talk to you about
entrepreneurship? And life sciences, okay? So that's my
past: I'm a professor of Anesthesiology, I'm an adjunct professor in
Health Informatics and I'm the director of technology discovery here at
M. D. Anderson. So I see a lot of familiar faces, I see a lot of
you have already been in my office. And what we do is really
support you when you have ideas and innovations and you want to drive
this forward. This is what we do. We created this office a
few years ago to support you in creating your dream, your
opportunity. I'm board certified in few things. Again, that tells
you that I have some kind of little attention deficit disorder maybe
for adults; I don't know how you want to call this. But I'm board
certified in anesthesiology, critical care, trauma and rescue medicine,
and because things were not enough I tried to do, or I succeeded in
doing an MBA at Rice University and one of my professors is here that I
had a couple of years ago at Rice. And right now I'm preparing
for my board in anti aging and regenerative medicine, because I think
that's a big field, it's coming, it's baby boomers, it's everything you
want to have when you think about start up and markets and big things
to come. I'm as well a serial entrepreneur, so I started my first
company in 1990 where I started a first online company. My
brother in law started it with a couple of friends and we were part of
the start up, and we were selling cars online in 1990. You
remember 1990? There was one problem with that company.
There was no online yet. [ laughter ] We had the trademark
at that time, for the “online” name. So even that we gave away
after nothing happened, and imagine what that name alone would be worth
today. So we were selling cars and parts through email, through a
system called CompuServe. Download speed 7 kilobits a second or
something like that, it took about half an hour to download a picture
of a Ferrari sitting in Italy to buy here. And at that time
almost no dealers had computers and those who had them didn't know how
to use them typically, so that tells you all about timing, vision,
futuristic thinking. We were right on but we were way too early.
Okay so we burned a million bucks and in 94 we decided to close the
company because we had no idea when that thing the internet will ever
come. A year later it was here, but our company was gone by
then. Okay, we didn't know that Venture Capital was out there and
they were looking for companies to be funded, even though if you just
had a concept on a napkin in 94 or 95, you would get millions and
millions of dollars to get this company running and we had a company
with sales going on. So again, we were too early, but we were too
stupid as well. We were not educated enough in this market space,
so what I try to bring across to you guys is that you educate yourself
what is possible in this space. How do you do it, and if you have
obstacles, how you overcome these obstacles? In addition to that,
so I formed a few companies after that and some of them are doing very
well today. In fact, I'm just starting a new one right now.
So I have raised the money, I know what the legals looks like, all
that. So everything I went through in the last maybe 2 decades,
we put together in this course. And we want to make this course
to a certain extent attractive, in a few lessons, and some of them you
just gotta be sitting and listening and at the end of the day I'm gonna
ask you for a question, if you have some. Now we do transmit this
course to other campuses and we decided there's only gonna be questions
from this room. So we tried to make it simple. We did these
kind of things before where we had teleconferences going on with MIT,
Harvard Medical School, and here; so on one screen you would see
Boston, on the other screen you would see us here and it was quite
complicated from the logistic, went very well, but this time we tried
to keep it simple. This course will be as well about writing
business plans. So I want you to start thinking about how to
write a business plan, and in fact not just thinking, we're gonna teach
ya how to do that and you're gonna have homework. So that's news,
you didn't know that in the email; but if you're here, all eight
courses, I'm gonna very likely give you a certificate for what you
did. Nice saying with a nice seal of M. D. Anderson. So I'm
negotiating that right now with the Educational Office. So there
is an incentive for you to come every course and do the homework and
the homework is always done in groups. Okay? Just so you
know. And we're gonna look at these business plans, I have been a
business plan reader for many places; Rice business plan competitions,
state wide things, nation wide business plan competitions, so we have a
little idea on how to look at these things. That's the problem we
have. This is why we do the course. We spend roughly 30
billion dollars in research and development here in the United States
in academic institutions. But when we look at what we call
technology transfer, technology commercialization, whatever comes out
of that money that we spent, we see very little return just
overall. Maybe you get lucky and get a Gatorade, but those big
winners you can count them all on one hand for all America for the last
30 years. So there needs to be much more buzz, many more if you
need to really not just think about it but do it. So this is what
we're trying to do, but the problem is there's a funding gap
typically. You get stuff funded by the NIH and other agencies to
do basic research, then you get stuff funded once you're a little along
the line and you have a product to show. Venture Capital comes
in, big pharmaceuticals come in, and they will start funding you for
these things. But in between is what we call the valley of death
or the funding gap and our office, one of the things we do, we kind of
bridge that funding gap. What we would provide is really the
consulting that you don't get typically. Most institutions have a
very limited support for people that are interested in doing
something. So again, so these are the problems that we see and
here at M. D. Anderson specifically, we did not have a mechanism really
set up to help people like you a few years ago. This is why I got
hired to start this office and in the mean time we have grown, Liz
Hileman is part of our office, Stanley Tucker part of our office, and
we have now our counterpart at UT system and I will introduce Kathy
Swain in a few minutes. Now everybody that comes in, make sure
that you always sign that sign up sheet because that's what they're
gonna look at when I do the certificates; if you were here or
not. You have to be here all 8 times. Okay, so a little few
words about our office and you're gonna hear that again because most of
you are M. D. Anderson people, you need to know that there's a
mechanism for you to get support. Okay? Our office got
created in 2003. Today what we have created only a few years ago, is
now the largest validation of proof of principle funding mechanism in
the nation and I would probably even dare to say probably
internationally. I just got invited to go to Europe to talk about
them because they were asking, well who's leading in that stuff?
And it's here, us at UT M. D. Anderson Cancer Center it looks
like. So we created quite some buzz internally here and
externally. Externally meaning anything from local to state to
nation and even world now. So that's quite interesting and you
can be part of this. Our office; we support funds, promote,
anything you have. You just come in, have an idea, don't know
what to do, you come to us. You write me an email, we'll sit
down, we'll just listen. We'll tell you this is great but it's
nothing that we're gonna do within the UT umbrella, go home and do it
in your garage or we'll say, yeah it's related to medicine therefore
we're gonna have to be involved someway and we're gonna show you step
by step what you're going to do to move this thing forward. This
is what we're all about. So what are we looking for? At the end
of the day I'm looking for creative faculty and employees who really
have some new ideas. We're gonna talk about how to get to new
ideas; how to be innovative, creative, things like that. I'm
looking for clear paths to commercialization. So if somebody
comes there and just is completely out of focus, this is what we do; we
try to focus. We are not doing research, we are not basically
paying you to do publications. When you need, for example, in an
animal study, 10,000 mice to do a statistically significant study; we
might just fund 5 or 10 mice to just show it works. We don't care
about the significance on the statistics, we just want to see what it
works and up because that gives us enough to move to the next
level. We need you to have a product in mind; a service, just
something that can be commercialized. Basic research needs to be
done. If not, we're gonna help you to tell you what kind of basic
research we think you need to do in order to come back into that track
that we tried to build for you. We really try to move away all
these road blocks for you, but you're going to have to do some homework
as well, that's always kind of working together. We want you to
be focused on product development. What is the drug, device,
software, or diagnostics? Typically medicine, anything you do
will fall under one of those 4 groups. And then anything we're
gonna do is always about milestones, budget, and time lines. So
it's not any gray zone on the budgeting, well a post doc here a post
doc there, no it's about the milestone or we're gonna tell you the mile
stone looks like this. It may be not what you're primary focus is
on your research, it may be what the market is looking for which might
be different. If you have 5 ways to do your research, we might
just pick number 6 that you never thought about it; so just a little
different approach. What do we offer? Open doors. You
come by anytime in our office, we offer you an open door in
consulting. We offer money; money talks. This is America
after all right? We have money to give away. Listen, we
have money to give away! Okay, it's not my wallet but it's M. D.
Anderson's and M. D. Anderson has done very well by giving you money
because people like you have done a good job. And we have Cathy
Swain here from UT and they have money to give away. So we are
ready to fund you if you are ready and you're doing your homework, and
we help you to do that. And we have connections with industry
should you need connections. We brought, just an hour ago before
we started, we brought researchers and the company together and tried
to make something happen to move things forward quickly. So we're
just gonna support you with the next steps; whether you want to build a
start up company, a license, or you don't care but you want to see this
thing move forward. So this is what we did in the last 2 years
roughly, 4 years. We met with over 1,200 faculty, one to one, for
one or two hours, whatever it takes to listen to what they have.
So you can contact us, we'll do. We formed little SWAT
teams. We don't care whether you're in this division, that
division, we just have a little SWAT team, we just cut across the
institution. We're gonna find the resource that you need today,
not in two months because it's in a different division. This is
what we do; very mobile, agile, go across the institution. We
presented 36 projects that we saw to a funding group that we have here
at M. D. Anderson and most of those got funded. So we spent about
1 point 7 million and counting. So these are the
results. September 06 we got at that point, maybe 1 point 2
million dollars invested; almost broke even with what we got back, but
just a year later we're already at least a half a million above what we
invested and counting. And we have not yet received a single
major royalty stream; that's all to come in the next few years.
So here we start talking maybe about very soon the big money, that
we'll hope. And some of that money may flow in your wallet.
So money talks at the end of the day, there's nothing wrong in science
to make money. There's nothing wrong to own part of the
beach. You still do your research, you still do your
publications, that if you do something well you get something back and
at the end of the day the patient gets something to be treated
with. So there's nothing wrong with that. So what is this
course all about? One more time; we are trying to support
creativity and innovation and all the entrepreneur activities that we
just talked about. This course is sponsored by the UT system
Office for Research and Technology Transfer. And Cathy Swain is
here with presenting that office and she's a cohost of this
course. So they're paying for all the stuff we're doing here,
then there's a little something involved because remember we want to be
creative ourselves; and this is a pilot program for a much larger
course that we're gonna send out invitations to about 350 thousand
people, all employees, faculty, and students in all 15 UT
campuses. So this is gonna be in the fall and we're already
putting together speaker lists and it's not gonna be as cozy or M. D.
Anderson centered, although we're gonna have a life room like now where
we do stuff, but it's gonna be broadcasted all over the place.
And as you see, we try to be innovative and creative with the
education. So right now, we have, what we do here is streaming
live on all the TVs, on your desktops across the UT campuses, M. D.
Anderson campuses. At the same time about, we have live exercises
or live things going on in this room. And about in a week from now,
everybody who wants to at M. D. Anderson will be able to go to the web
and just see what we did today on the web. So it's gonna be on
demand web broadcast, plus about a month from now you're going to be
able to download from iTunes University the little podcast and play it
on the iPods and see the slides on the iPod and listen to the
sound. So we're trying to just to be a little bit cool with these
things and a lot of students, they think iPods and walk iPod and that's
what they are, and so we try to go this way as well. So todays
program; introduction, we just basically did that, this is what this is
all about and we're just gonna walk you through from the conception of
the idea, what to do with it within the university, how to
commercialize it, where to find money, how to build your company, the
first business plan, how to start talking to people, what resources do
you have available locally here that can help you besides our office,
up to the point where you present something. The two hosts of this
course will be Cathy Swain from UT system and myself. And today
we're gonna have basically two lectures about innovation and creativity
and it's gonna be Jim Coleman, he's the vice provost at Rice
University, just started there five months ago and he's in charge of all
the research and technology transfer activities. And then the
other person is Jing Zhou. Jing Zhou is a professor at Rice
University and she was, as I said, my professor when I did my MBA and
we had a lot of fun in that class and something got stuck in my head
that we need to do something, and we already talked about it, I think
it's gonna be much bigger than what we're just doing here today.
I was always kind of thinking we need to spark something. You
know, remember, we're all scientists so we're all innovative
right? When you really think about it, we kind of do everyday, we
do the same thing; even in our innovation. So I even would make
the argument, we need to think outside the box of what we do
everyday. Even though we are innovative scientists, I think we're
still somewhere in the box and we need to open that box and she's gonna
help us to do that. So at the end of today, we're gonna do
different things. Nobody's gonna walk out, we're gonna form some
teams and I'm gonna tell you what the homework is. So Cathy
Swain, again, she has been in Venture Capital before, investment
banking, overseeing this billion dollar UT investment fund, part of
that group, was in real estate, and is now the assistant vice
chancellor of business development in the office of research and
technology transfer of the UT system Austin. So I would like to
welcome you and maybe come up and do your introductions, so really
let's get started with this course and this is what we're gonna
do.
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