H@cking Medicine
A Production of the Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship

We are proud to announce the second iteration of Hacking Medicine. Engineers, scientists, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in one location, creating disruptive healthcare solutions today.

If you want to radically change healthcare, then apply now: http://bit.ly/z1PNZU. Bring your skills, your ideas, or both. We’re selecting 80 people just like you. Applications must be submitted by 11:59pm on Sunday, Feb. 19th to be considered!

Be part of the conference. Leave with a team, cash prizes, and a hack on its first steps towards becoming a company and disrupting healthcare.

To apply to be one of the 80: http://bit.ly/z1PNZU

Hacking Medicine takes place February 25th and 26th at the Media Lab at MIT. If you are selected we will send you more detailed logistics.

Check out our press coverage:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/hacking-medicine-conference.html

http://medgadget.com/2011/10/hacking-medicine-conference-at-mit-media-lab.html

Healthcare needs you, come be part of the solution.

Day 1: Saturday February 25, 2012
9:30am – Registration Opens (Coffee and Bagels served)
10:15am – Opening Welcome Message
10:30 – 11:00am– Keynote Speaker
11:00 – 12:00pm – Idea Pitches
12:00 – 12:30pm – Group Assembly Part I
12:30 – 1:00pm – Group Assembly Part 2
1:00 – 5:30pm – Hacking
5:30 – 6:00pm – Wrap-up

Day 2: Sunday February 26, 2012
9:30am – Doors open with Coffee and Bagels
10:00am – All groups assemble, review judging requirements
10:00 – 3:30pm – Team Hacking
3:30 – 4:00pm – Turn in presentations
4:00 – 6:00pm – Teams present their work from the day and next steps.
6:00pm – Judges announce winners

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Highly recommend this talk if you are free:

The MIT VCPE Club is happy to host Michael Sheeley, Co-Founder and COO of FitnessKeeper, recently described as a “billion dollar company” by serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. FitnessKeeper raised $10 million in November, after a $1.5 million round last year — which they never spent, because the company was so profitable.

Come enjoy lunch with Mike and learn about how they did it.

Date: Thursday 12/8
Time: Noon – 1 PM
Location: E62-262
Why: Because you want to build a billion dollar company too…

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We are really excited to announce that two of the Hacking Medicine teams (OnMotion and Podimetrics) from just a week and a half ago made it to the Elevator Pitch Competition finals this week and Podimetrics won the runner up award as well as the audience choice award. Congrats!!!

In the spirit of next steps we wanted to make sure everyone saw the upcoming Go Viral competition:
Based on the success of last spring’s event, the Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Engineering are sponsoring the 2nd annual Go Viral to Improve Health: Health Data Collegiate Challenge. Working in interdisciplinary teams that meld technological skills with health knowledge, college and health professional students can generate powerful apps to improve health for individuals and communities. A video of last year’s first-place winners presenting their app, Sleep Bot, at the 2011 Health Data Initiative Forum can be found here. Information about eligibility, judging criteria, and registration is available on the IOM webpage, www.iom.edu/goviral, and the Facebook page, www.facebook.com/goviraltoimprovehealth. This year, a total of $10,000 in prizes will be available to the student teams who develop the best new health apps. Team registration is open until February 10, 2012.

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In the spirit of looking for next steps in the Healthcare community around the Northeast we have two exciting new opportunities for you to look at.

The first is Blueprint Health – Here is a blurb about it:
Are you a healthcare entrepreneur or do you have a health or healthcare idea? Blueprint Health is a TechStars affiliated startup accelerator program based in NYC that helps early stage healthcare companies get started. Surround yourself with nearly 100 mentors – healthcare entrepreneurs, VCs and innovators – that want to help you succeed! Over the course of a 3 month program, we support entrepreneurs who are building innovative companies at the intersection of health and technology by providing capital, office space and most critically, access to the most robust community of healthcare mentors of any accelerator program. We encourage you to learn more and to apply to our Winter program, which starts January 9th, by visiting www.BlueprintHealth.org.

The second place to take your new healthcare ideas is Startlabs.org who is running a class at MIT over January (IAP): http://startlabs.org/c2c.

As always let us know how we can help, and get out there and keep working on your ideas! Healthcare needs you.

-The Hacking Medicine Team

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Thank you for an amazing weekend. This event would not have been possible without the enthusiasm, ideas, and participation of people like you.

We, the organizers, deeply enjoyed putting on this event for the community.

Please fill out the form and we’ll put you on our mailing list for news and future events: http://bit.ly/mYjeAR

This is not the end. Hacking Medicine is a movement dedicated to raising the profile of medical entrepreneurship throughout Boston and beyond. We had attendees from as far as California and the Netherlands and we want to spread the idea that systemic medical problems can be solved today.

We’d love for you to give us feedback and get involved.

Feel free to get in touch with us directly at hackmed-info@mit.edu

Looking forward,
-The Hacking Medicine Team

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Here is a list of projects.  If you would like to join a team or if you have information that would be useful to the teams, please contact them directly or please tweet on #hackingmedicine about it.

Check the projects here: http://bit.ly/nIDEmb

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Now that you’re in groups focusing on a specific project, the goal of the weekend is to hash out as much as possible about your idea in preparation for your funding pitch and beyond.

If you can build a demo or a product, prioritize that. Straight from Sutha Kamal, one of the judges.

Your pitch is only 3 minutes long so you’ll need to be concise. We want three slides max. You don’t have to include everything below, but think about these points.

Potential Impact:
What is the fundamental problem you are addressing and how big is the market?
What are the best existing solutions? How is your method superior to what already exists?

Technical Information:
What are the technical specifications for your product?
What is unspecified in your design? What will it take to further specify the components?
What are the drawbacks in your design?

Next Steps:
What are your next steps moving forward? Consider the following events (if applicable):
• Finish underlying research
• Lean startup – Customer validation
• Validate technical implementation
• Create prototype of product
• Launch to market

Break down each task into actionable items you’ll be doing in the future.

Good luck and we look forward to your great ideas!

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Don’t forget to join us for the Massive Health happy hour at Mead Hall in Cambridge at the end of Saturday (approx 6pm).

Healthcare costs are skyrocketing.  In 2009 we spent 17.9% of GDP and rising on healthcare, and for all this expense we aren’t even getting high quality care.

We can do better.  We MUST do better.  We need to dramatically bend the cost curve in healthcare, expand access to care and improve the quality of care across the board.  To do this we need innovation and entrepreneurship to move at the speed we see in software and on the web.  We can do this in healthcare and medicine.

We created Hacking Medicine at MIT in order to help students and members of the community learn about the hackable areas of medicine, find like minded team members, and dive in on new projects that hold the promise to become disruptive healthcare companies.

MIT, the birthplace of hacking, is the perfect place to launch this effort.  Entrepreneurship is in our blood here and we are also home to some of the world’s leading research medical devices, software, and biosensors.  By combining our hacking culture with the research happening on campus, with Harvard Medical School, MGH and the rest of the medical community around Boston we can dramatically impact healthcare for the better.

As we have seen across this week’s blog posts, the intersection of Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Materials Engineering, and Biological Engineering is creating new opportunities in Healthcare Automation, Big Data, Biosensing, and Synthetic Biology.  These technologies hold the promise to enable us to drive costs down while simultaneously improving access and quality of care.  This is possible because YOU a group of optimistic engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs refuse to accept a trade-off between quality, access, and cost.  We refuse to live in a world of no-win scenarios.

The response to this call for action has been overwhelming.  We had more than twice the number of applications than we can accomodate at this year’s event.  We truly appreciate the energy and dedication that everyone has shown leading up to this weekend and are extremely excited to see the projects that come out of the weekend.

The agenda is posted here: http://hackingmedicine.mit.edu/conference/agenda.

Come ready to share ideas and create new ones.

Bring your laptop, bring your creativity, and most importantly bring your passion to change healthcare.

Written by Elliot Cohen, a Founding Hacker for Hacking Medicine.

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Such is the perennial challenge of synthetic biology – to program living entities and biological materials to achieve novel function. How does this apply to healthcare? Engineered viruses that target and destroy infectious bacteria have spawned startups targeting industrial applications and bacterial infection. Human cells have been rewired to secrete insulin in response to flashes of blue light. This might lead to an implant for diabetics that monitors blood glucose and secretes insulin on demand – an artificial pancreas. Other biomedical examples are gene circuits that detect and kill cancer cells and regulates chemical levels in blood to prevent gout.

Most of these applications are created by combining parts. Much like electrical engineers build circuits with resistors and capacitors, synthetic biologists hook up elements that control gene expression, sensors for inputs like chemicals and light, and actuators like toxin release or gene transcription.

Biology unfortunately gets in the way. Putting these parts together isn’t predictable – most parts are not well characterized, meaning a biologist can’t model the response of his circuit. This is why independent organizations like the Parts Registry are leading the effort to characterize parts. Some startups like Gingko Bioworks can even build and test the circuits for your application.

An even bigger challenge is what to do with the synthetic components once you build them. If you build a genetic circuit, how do you safely introduce it into a live organism safely and effectively? How do you make sure it still works in this new environment? How do you prevent it from mutating into something useless, or worse, harmful?

Due to these challenges the field is still waiting for its killer app. So far large-scale biosynthesis has taken most of the attention. Genetically engineered organisms can make biofuels out of biomass and even just sunlight and waste CO2. The same principles can be applied to making artemesinin, a critical drug for malaria, vaccines, and other protein therapeutics like antibodies.

But when can we inject modified cells and circuits into humans to treat and cure diseases that aren’t as treatable with drugs? The field is getting there – Intrexon is working on a cancer treatment in which synthetic DNA molecules are injected around a tumor. A patient takes a pill and activates the DNA, stimulating the immune system to destroy the tumor.

Clearly there are numerous issues and barriers to applying synthetic biology to biomedicine. What can we do with the tools available now to get around these barriers?

Written by Allen Cheng, a Founding Hacker for Hacking Medicine.

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