The fields of bioscience and medicine rely heavily on photonics for their research, development, and clinical endeavors. Professionals in these fields exploit photonic technologies that include precision sensing, imaging of all types, and even materials processing (otherwise known as surgery).
Even with all the social media available, however, the best exchanges often happen face-to-face. Accordingly, our publisher PennWell has created the Strategies in Biophotonics conference, to be held at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel from September 9 to 11, 2014. BioOptics World editor-in-chief Barbara Goode and Laser Focus World editor-in-chief Conard Holton will be co-chairing the conference.
Strategies in Biophotonics is a two-and-a-half-day event that will include keynotes, conference sessions, and an exhibition. Note: point-of-care medical technology—a burgeoning field that offers potentially huge business opportunities—will be an oft-discussed topic.
Keynote speakers
On Tuesday, Robert S. Langer, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Cambridge, MA) will speak on creating and implementing breakthrough technologies; Langer holds patents that have been licensed by more than 250 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology, and medical-device companies. He will discuss several different case studies in the areas of drug delivery, medical devices, and biotherapeutics, examining them in terms of the process and excitement of discovery, any initial resistance by the scientific community, patenting, the technology transfer to companies, and their commercialization.
Wednesday and Thursday will each include strong keynotes. On Wednesday, Greg Olsen, a research scientist and entrepreneur who founded EPITAXX and Sensors Unlimited and who is now president of “angel” investment firm GHO Ventures (Princeton, NJ), will speak on key lessons learned on the path from researcher to entrepreneur. After a decade of working as a research scientist and with no business training, he got the idea to start a new business. He says his graduate science training helped him achieve his success. He will also explain how small-company success is based mostly on “intuition, instinct, and hard work.” He will conclude by sharing a few highlights from his 2005 trip as the third private citizen to orbit the earth on the International Space Station.
Thursday’s first keynote will be delivered by Gregory Altshuler, VP of R&D at Dental Photonics (Walpole, MA); his talk will cover light-based technology in aesthetic medicine and delve into lessons learned from successes and failures. Aydogan Ozcan, a professor at UCLA, associate director at the California NanoSystems Institute, and founder of Holomic LLC (Los Angeles, CA), will speak on mobile health, including the democratization of next-generation imaging, diagnostics, and measurement tools; in particular, he will be discussing the exciting new development platform offered by phones and other consumer electronics.
Conference sessions
Session topics will range from business to technical to the melding of both (for example, disruptive innovation). A few of the many individual sessions are summarized below.
On Tuesday, Anita Goel, chairman and CEO of Nanobiosym (Cambridge, MA), will discuss advanced nanotech capabilities pioneered in her lab to probe and control biological nanomachines that read and write information in DNA, and how this process is influenced by the environment. Applications include next-generation nanosensors that can be used for pathogen detection and product platforms like Gene-RADAR, a point-of-care diagnostic that aims to mobilize, personalize, and decentralize the next generation of health care.
Randal Chinnock, founder and CEO of Optimum Technologies (Southbridge, MA), will talk about disposable optics for biomedicine. For medical devices containing optics, the decision to use disposable versus reusable optics is paramount to meeting specific requirements; with the development of new manufacturing techniques, disposable optics have become a viable alternative to reusable optics. (And disposable optics, of course, are very relevant to new point-of-care photonic technologies.)
On Wednesday, a panel discussion, “The Practitioner’s Perspective,” will be held. With an eye toward helping device and system developers meet clinical and research needs, the session will explore the perspective of the life-sciences practitioner to understand what steps technologists can take to ensure that their creations have the best possible chance of succeeding in the real world.
The moderator will be Fabian D’Souza, president of Boston Strategic Partners, a firm he founded in 2003 to offer management consulting services to organizations working in the life sciences. John Frangioni, an expert in molecular imaging who is attending physician of hematology and oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School, will be on the panel; his laboratory focuses on the development of novel medical devices and disease-specific contrast agents for diagnosing and treating cancer. Penny Ford-Carleton is another panelist; she is currently a member of the Governance Board for the Innovation Learning Network based at Kaiser Permanente (Oakland, CA), an Innovation Council member, Innovation Conference co-chair for the Harvard Center for Primary Care, and coordinator of the CIMIT/Boston Simulation Consortium.
On the business side, Fred Peyerl, a partner at Boston Strategic Partners, will lead a discussion to help answer the questions: What need will your biophotonics-based system fulfill? How will it succeed in the market? Peyerl brings his experience working with clients across the life sciences industry, including pharmaceutical, medical device, diagnostic, and payor/benefits-management companies. His session will explore business modeling, offering a number of options as examples for biomedical systems, and will cover development of distribution channels, decisions on pricing, and marketing for best impact.
Myron Greenspan, an attorney and partner at Lackenbach Siegel LLP (Scarsdale, NY), an intellectual-property law practice, will present must-know information for inventors, discussing the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA). The AIA, a U.S. federal statute whose central provisions went into effect in late 2012 and early 2013, has changed the U.S. patent system.
Finance expert John Dexheimer, who is president of LightWave Advisors, will lead a panel of investors as they discuss issues of importance for technology innovators; the session will report observations and, as much as possible, quantify trends as well. The panel will entertain questions from the audience as it provides guidance on what product developers should consider in terms of financing their operations.
Thursday’s sessions will include one on recent major advances in optical-biopsy spectroscopy, given by Robert Alfano, who heads the Institute of Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers at the City College of the City University of New York. He will discuss key fingerprints to detect aggressive cancer cells, the two new near-IR spectral windows for imaging with less scattering of light in tissue, new dyes, and compact optical analyzers for cancer detection without removing tissue in biomedicine applications.
A panel will be held on Thursday on “Disruptive Innovation and the Future of Photonics-Based Medicine,” with Daniel Gareau as moderator. Gareau is a member of Rockefeller University’s Clinical Scholars Program, where he works on applying new imaging technology and software algorithms to enable rapid, noninvasive, quantitative melanoma screening in pigmented lesions.
Guillermo Tearney, one of the panelists, is professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and heads a lab at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital; his lab was the first to perform human imaging in the coronary arteries and gastrointestinal tract in vivo with optical coherence tomography (OCT).
For more information on Strategies in Biophotonics 2014 and to register, please visit http://www.strategiesinbiophotonics.com.
