The second half features Heather Steinman, senior vice president, business development and executive director of technology transfer at The Wistar Institute and Carole Burns, director of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Blumberg Institute. They discuss the future of tech transfer along with some key advice to our listeners.

Other news - We’re proud to announce that Lou Kassa has been featured on the Philadelphia Business Journal’s Power 100 for the fourth year in a row! Read more here. 

Our second half features Dr. Nicole Geracimos, who is president of the medical staff at Penn Medicine Doylestown Health and a guest speaker during the Summer Two-Week program. 

To learn more about our education programs and how to support, please visit, blumberginstitute.org! 

We’re also thrilled that Dr. Siciliano is the Keynote Speaker at our Nov. 13 Regional Biotechnology Conference at the PABC! 

Interested in attending the Nov. 13 event? More can be found here! 

More on Naturaz can be found here.

Diya Thomas, a student at Penn State University, shares her experience at the Pennsylvania Biotechnology Center (PABC) and her internship at Greene Street.

In the second half Ed Tate, head of communications, talks with Emma Dolen, PhD student at Harvard University, about her social media post about the federal cuts that went viral. 

 A snippet of Emma’s social media post:

As major news outlets seem to be focused on other stories recently (Kendrick vs. Drake feud anyone?), I wanted to draw attention to a decision that the federal government made on Friday, Feb. 7 that directly impacts my life and will soon impact yours. On that day, the NIH under the new administration decided to cap indirect research costs at 15%. Okay, so what does this mean and why should we care?

Many biomedical research projects in the U.S. are funded by the NIH. When a researcher applies for an NIH grant (an extremely competitive process) and gets funded, the specific lab and project gets that money to conduct the specific research. This is known as direct research costs. In addition, the institution where the research is conducted gets more money on top of that. These additional funds go towards electricity, janitorial staff, compliance, accounting, safety measures and more. These are called indirect research costs. Currently, the NIH and institutions negotiate on how much indirect research costs the institution will get with their grants. This number can range from 10% to 70% depending on the institution. So, for example, if a researcher gets a $100 grant from the NIH, they get $100 of direct costs for their particular project, and their institution gets an additional $10-70 of indirect costs on top of that, effectively resulting in $110-170 of research funding. Now, after the federal government's decision, that number will be capped at 15%.  This will impact all NIH-funded research institutions, but as I do not know the financial details of every school and institute, I will tell you how it will affect me:

I am a PhD student at Harvard researching a protein implicated in brain cancers such as glioblastoma and pediatric gliomas. The goal of my project is to learn more about a particular protein that we think has the potential to be a target for brain cancer drugs. I have built tools to accelerate the research of this protein and learned about how it works. One of the tools I have built will allow my lab and others to more easily search for drugs that will work on this protein and hopefully kill brain cancer cells in patients. That work is in jeopardy…

On this episode you will hear from Jeff DeVuono, EVP & senior managing director, at Brandywine Realty Trust and Matthew Burkhardt, director at B+labs, discussing the start and future of B+labs. You'll also get to hear from John Kulp, longtime PABC member and founder of two companies, one focusing on AI.

Learn more on our podcast sponsor, Pofabro Communications here!
 
Interested in sponsoring an episode? Reach out to alaina.schukraft@hepb.org for more information!