Cancer Accelerator Teams Benefit From Mentorship, Industry Experts
Mentorship and feedback from a diverse and talented External Review Panel provided immense value to participants in the most recent DIAC cohort.
By Kelly Burch
Paul J. Robustelli is working to better understand how small molecule drugs bind to disordered proteins. Eventually, the work could lead to the discovery of new treatments for conditions like cancer.
Robustelli—who is the James O. Freedman Professor in the Neukom Academic Cluster in Computational Science and Assistant Professor of Chemistry—advanced toward that goal this spring, thanks to funding and mentorship provided through the Dartmouth Innovations Accelerator for Cancer (DIAC), which just concluded its fifth year.
The fifth DIAC cohort had ten teams competing for a total of $300,000 in funding. Potentially even more valuable was the guidance from industry mentors and feedback from the external review panel, which included biotech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and other industry experts.
“The feedback from the external review panel was very insightful and will inform how we think about and plan our go-to-market strategy,” said Erika L. Moen, Quinn Scholar for the DIAC cohort, and Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Data Science and The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.
Each DIAC team completed an eight-week educational component and was matched with an industry mentor and a student from Tuck School of Business to guide business planning. The result, participants say, was a comprehensive approach to moving ground-breaking innovation from Dartmouth labs and, eventually, into the clinic.
“Participants are going after interesting problems and coming up with interesting solutions,” said Mitch Kossar, Thayer ’94, co-founder of YK Bioventures and member of the External Review Panel. “Innovators could always use more mentorship, which is what we’re about. That’s what this whole program is about.”
Innovating new solutions
Heidi Chapman, Geisel ’18, is Program Officer for the Gate’s Foundation Accelerator, and brought that expertise to Hanover as a member of the External Review Panel. She found the DIAC teams not only had strong scientific backgrounds, but also understood the path to commercialization.
“You could see the DIAC training in work, with innovators thinking beyond what applications might be interesting to pursue, to what applications make the most sense for market entry,” Chapman said.
Programs like DIAC have an opportunity to not only apply innovation to healthcare as it exists now, she said, but to shift the healthcare and hospital system through new solutions.
“During my time at Dartmouth, I saw how the focus on entrepreneurship not only improved the level of research being done, but better prepared the graduate students for life after Dartmouth by pushing them to think about how their research could impact others,” Chapman said. “By participating in DIAC I hope to encourage both faculty and students to think creatively about how their innovations can be translated into meaningful products.”
Shinichiro Fuse, Geisel ’08, brought his expertise as Partner and Managing Director at TPG Life Sciences Innovations to the External Review Panel.
Fuse was struck by “the diversity of technologies to address a variety of issues surrounding cancer—ranging from analyzing disordered proteins and immune-based therapies, to tackling pain and rural disparities,” he said.
External review panel member Lee Cooper, D’09, Managing Director of Delos Capital, said the diversity of ideas "reflects the breadth of work going on across Dartmouth.”
“We saw novel drug design methods, surgical tools, digital health, and more,” he said.
Similarly, teams benefited from the array of perspectives available on the External Review Panel.
“I was consistently and pleasantly surprised by the breadth of expertise that we saw on the ERP,” Cooper said.
Having access to such a wide range of experts in biotech innovation meant teams received feedback covering technical, clinical, and commercial topics.
Guided by industry mentors
That feedback, as well as input from industry mentors, will help teams like Robustelli’s determine how best to move their technology to market.
“Our DIAC team benefited from a number of valuable conversations with our industry mentor, Dr. Micah Benson, who shared his own experiences in biotech and provided very practical guidance about paths to commercialization,” said Robustelli, whose team won first place in the pitch competition and was awarded $135,000 in funding.
“Micah shared the concept beyond our drug design platform with some of his contacts in the VC world and was able to return valuable advice about disordered targets that investors would be excited about,” he added.
This year, for the first time, all participating teams were awarded $10,000. Wisse E. Haakma, a second year PhD student in the Cancer Biology program, plans to leverage those funds to conduct experiments that should help him secure federal funding for additional research in the future.
"We believe these experiments will drastically improve our chances of successful NIH funding application in the future,” he said.
Haakma said that DIAC provided an important opportunity to talk with people who aren’t just scientists, but are industry experts.
“The transition from something that is a cool concept in the lab towards a product that can really help people is not a process that is carried out just by scientists,” he said.
Pitching the External Review Panel gave him a safe space to practice a new skill, he added.
“It allowed me to get familiar with the concept and process of investment pitching, without fully having to step into that world,” Haakma said.
Moen, participant and Quinn Scholar for the cohort, says that feedback from both her industry mentor and the external review panel was invaluable.
“Our mentor, Shayan Bhattacharyya, really helped us craft our story,” she said. “With his guidance we were able to develop a strong pitch to the External Review Panel.”
‘Impacts well beyond cancer’
For many members of the External Review Panel, participating in DIAC is a way to give back to the Dartmouth community that supported them.
“I have benefited from alumni mentorship and advice in many aspects of my own life,” said Cooper. “It is fun to be able to try to do the same for others, hopefully strengthening Dartmouth's innovation ecosystem along the way.”
Cooper would like to see DIAC continue to expand, enhancing the thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem at Dartmouth.
“There is so much work going on across disciplines at Dartmouth with the potential to benefit human health and well being,” he said. “Part of the ambition of DIAC is to grow a broader institutional culture of translating academic ideas into practical solutions, which of course can have impacts beyond the prevention and treatment of cancer.”
About DIAC
The Dartmouth Innovation Accelerator for Cancer (DIAC) is a partnership between the Dartmouth Cancer Center and the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship that provides innovators across Dartmouth with the support, entrepreneurial guidance, and infrastructure needed to translate their cancer-fighting therapeutic, devices and diagnostics marketplace.
DIAC is a philanthropic initiative of the Call to Lead Campaign that launched in October 2020.
To date, DIAC has awarded more than $2 million in funding to advance scientific research, and teams have gone on to secure more than $17 million in funding. More than 300 faculty, staff, and students representing 73 teams have participated in the program, alongside faculty and staff.
DIAC accepts applications once per year from Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Health faculty-led teams working on cancer-related projects and provides these teams with co-curricular educational programming, mentorship, and funding to help them to evaluate and develop a commercialization plan for their innovations and harness the resources needed to accelerate the implementation of these solutions to improve people’s lives. Learn more here.