On Oct. 21, more than 300 Cornell and Weill Cornell Medicine faculty, students and alumni, as well as interested outsiders, joined the 2022 Eclectic Convergence Summit at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island. The daylong conference, sponsored by Entrepreneurship at Cornell, included talks from entrepreneurs, business executives and venture capitalists, as well as a pitch competition among business founders from Cornell’s Ithaca campus, Cornell Tech and Weill Cornell Medicine. The day’s talks spanned the gamut of biopharmaceuticals, women’s health, technology and social enterprises.
Dr. Lara Sullivan, president and CEO of Pyxis Oncology, found in entrepreneurship a career that married her passions in medicine and business. The daughter of two doctors, Dr. Sullivan studied comparative literature at Cornell before entering an M.D.-MBA program at Penn with the goal of practicing medicine. In the process, however, she found the business side to be a better fit. During the conference, Dr. Sullivan shared her journey from management consulting and investment banking to leadership positions at Pfizer and, eventually, to biotech entrepreneurship.
“At Pfizer, I saw all of the science, from discovery all the way to proof of concept, across all therapeutic areas of the company,” she said.
During that time, she spun out SpringWorks Therapeutics from Pfizer before founding Pyxis, a company creating a line of medicines to target tumor cells and overcome immune suppression in patients with difficult-to-treat cancers.
Dr. Sulllivan’s work demonstrates the promise of entrepreneurship to bring advanced treatments and therapies to market. It also highlights why Weill Cornell Medicine Enterprise Innovation is a vital resource for faculty and trainees. Expertise offered by Enterprise Innovation covers entrepreneurship education, resources, business development strategies and beyond – all part of invaluable step-by step guidance to many Weill Cornell Medicine researchers who are dedicated to seeing their innovations translated into products through commercial partnerships and entrepreneurial endeavors.
One such faculty entrepreneur is Dr. Nicholas Schiff, the Jerold B. Katz Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience. Dr. Schiff pitched his technology, Re-EmergeDBS, during the startup competition. Dr. Schiff and his collaborators (a group consisting of a biomedical engineer, a physiologist and a neurosurgeon) are launching a deep brain stimulation company for the treatment of traumatic brain injuries. The candidate therapy involves direct electrical stimulation of the central thalamus, both the cells and fiber bundle, of the human brain to improve chronically impaired cognitive functions in patients with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury. Intellectual property covering the technology includes the use of specialized neuro imaging technologies and bioelectric field modeling. Clinical trials testing the technology show a 30 percent improvement in patients, which is much higher than the NIH success threshold of 10 percent. Dr. Schiff’s technology can potentially benefit about 3 million patients who suffer traumatic brain injuries in the U.S. and Europe every year.
Lynda Inséqué, Assistant Director of Technology Initiatives & Outreach at CTL, announcing the winner of the pitch competition. Credit: Jesse Winter
Center for Technology Licensing (CTL) at Weill Cornell, part of Enterprise Innovation, coached Weill Cornell participants in their pitches as well as presentation skills and is actively working with Dr. Schiff on the formation and launch of a startup based on the Re-EmergeDBS technology. CTL’s Rising Innovator Women Awardees based in Ithaca, Dr. Greeshma Gadikota, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Dr. Alexa Schmitz, a postdoctoral research associate in biological and environmental engineering, both entered the competition as well. Dr. Gadikota won the top prize of $5,000 for her company, Carbon to Stone, which uses technology she invented to capture carbon dioxide from industrial emissions and convert it into solid calcium and magnesium carbonates.
A version of this story, authored by Kathy Hovis, writer and podcast host for Entrepreneurship at Cornell, first appeared on the college’s newsroom.