Fusion — Disciplines — Science — 2009–10
2009–10 Scientific Focus · The pilot year
Genomics and Genetic Diagnostics
The first cycle, and the one that established the pattern everything since has followed: a leading researcher teaching their own field to students who are not specialists in it, and teams building commercial arguments around discoveries nobody had yet evaluated.
In the pilot year, Dr. Joseph Nadeau — then chair of Genetics at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, later Director of Research and Academic Affairs at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle — guided students through the science and the applications of human genomics.
Working with Nadeau's career-length understanding of a field that was moving very fast, student teams cultivated product concepts and business models to commercialize diagnostics related to HIV and cancer.
Teams were also given access to clinicians, start-up companies, venture capitalists, and intellectual property attorneys, to broaden and deepen their sense of what was practically achievable with the discoveries in front of them. That access — people who had actually done it, sitting with students who had not — proved to be the element that could not be substituted, and it has been part of every cycle since.
Genomics in 2009 was a field where the science was outrunning both the regulatory framework and the business models. That made it an uncomfortable place to build a commercial case, and therefore an unusually good place to learn how.