We’re excited to announce the launch of Science2Startup, an invitation-only university-focused biotech entrepreneurship event aimed at building connectivity across the academic, tech transfer, and venture communities.
This event is in many ways a relaunch of the successful URES (University Research & Entrepreneurship Symposium) event, which Atlas helped organize from 2006-2013. URES was widely viewed as a great event for connecting entrepreneurial academic investigators from all of the country with experienced venture investors in the Cambridge/Boston startup ecosystem. Over the years, hundreds of proposals were reviewed from universities around the world, and dozens selected to present at URES events. An early 2011 blog post highlighted some of the projects that were being presented at URES 2011. There are more than dozen examples of startups that emerged from presentations at URES.
Working with our friends at SV Health Investors and F-Prime Capital, we’ve modeled Science2Startup (S2S) after some of the best elements of URES, and are planning for our inaugural event on April 24, 2018 at the Broad Institute.
The mission of S2S is to connect world-class academic science with the venture ecosystem to stimulate the creation of innovative therapeutic discovery startups. We hope this event can help catalyze the convergence of ideas, people, and capital that will foster new venture formation. The event will bring together investors, entrepreneurs, and the academic communities to talk about innovative therapeutics coming out of universities worldwide and how we can work together to translate these ideas into great companies.
The format is a one-day invitation-only symposium featuring presentations and posters on innovative startup ideas accompanied by what we hope will be provocative panel discussions and a fun concluding networking reception.
The presenters will be selected by the S2S advisory committee, with a bias towards startup ideas building on science with biologic validation (“proof of principle”) and a conceivable plan to enter clinical development in the near- to mid-term (2-4 years). One key difference from the URES event of years past: S2S is exclusively focused only on therapeutics projects (not diagnostics, medical devices, etc…)
A big part of the community-building aspect of S2S, and URES before it, is the mentorship program. We have assembled (and are adding to) an amazing advisory board comprised of top investors, prominent entrepreneurs, and drug development veterans to help the selected presenters refine their venture proposals before the symposium.
If you have a startup therapeutics idea and would like to present at S2S, here’s the invitation and selection process – there are some deadlines approaching:
- One-page proposal ideas can be submitted by tech transfer offices or academic investigators directly at the website. These proposals are due in five weeks – by November 15, 2017.
- These proposals will be reviewed and a subset will notified in early December to submit formal presentations by the end of January 2018.
- In February 2018, we will select from these submissions a set of final S2S presenters, either for an oral presentation or a poster.
- Over the final two months, presenters will work with their designated S2S mentors on refining their presentation prior to the event on April 24, 2018
If you are an entrepreneur, biotech executive, or investor in the biotech venture ecosystem, and would like to attend S2S as an invited guest, please contact us at info@science2startup.com. Please do the same if you are an academic investigator or a university tech transfer professional and want to learn more.
To create the level of connectivity we’re aspiring to do, this event is designed to be small and invite-only, but at the same time balancing our goal of keeping it as “big tent” as possible.