Hello Tri-I Community!

We have expanded to Rockefeller and MSK since our last newsletter! For those who have not received a newsletter from SVG before, the main goals of the club include connecting PhD students and postdocs with the biotech startups, incubators, and accelerator programs in NYC to help build post-graduation business ventures. This is achieved by providing resources to learn how to develop business plans, pitch ideas to investors in academic setting, and the matching of students with mentors and career development opportunities in the surrounding health care community. This month, our largest student turnout since covid participated in the Deep Tech NYC - VC/Startup Ecosystem Happy Hour with SOSV's HAX & IndieBio, where we made connections with new founders and students from Columbia University. In addition, we attended the Big Red Ventures annual meeting, linking with students from Cornell Ithaca and Cornell Tech, as well as other startup founders around the city. If this sounds exciting to you, please join us for more information about upcoming events. 

SVG student body meetings are held in-person every last Wednesday of each month at 4:30 pm EST in the Bioventure eLab located at 1157 York Ave! Next meeting will be May 25th. There will be food and beverages for those who can make it! Join for an exciting discussion about future events, opportunities, the direction of the club, and the possibility of helping with our liaisons with outreach. Our liaison program has succeeded in creating a multitude of new connections with companies around the city. We hope to schedule tours and information sessions with these organizations in the upcoming months.

We are always looking for more entrepreneurship opportunities to participate in and share with our community. If you want to be involved further with the Startup Venture Group (and we would love to have you), please fill out this survey to subscribe to our newsletter, join our slack channel, or offer help here! You can also find us on Twitter (@StartupWCM) and at our website, https://svg.bio.

Sincerely,

Annalise Schweickart
President, Startup Venture Group
PhD Candidate, Krumsiek Laboratory
Weill Cornell Medicine

Faculty Feature: Dr. Vincent Fischetti

For this newsletter’s Faculty Feature, Annalise Schweickart (SVG President) and Nick Bartelo (SVG Co-chair of Outreach) had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Vincent Fischetti, head of the Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis and Immunology at Rockefeller University. Fischetti received his Ph.D. from New York University in Medical Microbiology and Bacteriology and a postdoc at Rockefeller University, where he began to work on defining the structure of the M protein. Fischetti became an assistant professor at Rockefeller in 1973, an associate professor in 1978, and a full professor in 1990. He is most well known for his research on and development therapeutics using lysin, an enzyme designed to burst open bacteria. In addition to his academic success, he has created multiple companies, and served on academic advisory boards. One company licensing Fischetti's technology, Contrafect, is currently performing Phase 3 clinical trials, of which the therapeutic industry is eagerly awaiting results. He is now in his 32nd year as a Rockefeller professor, continuing to pioneer the creation of novel technologies and cutting-edge research on the microbial world.

SVG: From your earliest experiences in studying biology, you had a lot of freedom in your work. Reflecting on your success, would you say that the lack of strict supervision had an influence on your ability to achieve your breakthroughs in science, or do you wish there was more structure?

Vischetti: I think structure is bad. I've always believed that you just follow your nose, and you do the experiments that you have to do that just satisfies your interest. If you're going on a strict path, then you're going to miss all the interesting things that are that are out there. There is a lot of luck in this! It's being right there at the right time, and making the right observation and moving in that direction. I may have a grant on a project, but never stuck to that project. I always followed the way I would want to go. I may not have had the progress that the grant originally was for, but there was still high progress. So we always got funded.

SVG: Since you first developed a therapeutic approach to bacterial infections using lysin over 20 years ago, you have added an enormous number of patents using this technology. Do you have advice on the patent process for graduate students who believe they have developed a new method?

Vischetti: When I made an observation about a molecule in the M protein, I learned a real lesson that unless you patent your technology, it'll never be developed. No one will touch it unless they have at least 20 years or 15 years to regain their investment. 

Unfortunately, now, the patent office is first to patent, not first to invent. It's very frustrating because someone could just write a patent without doing any experiments and beat you on an idea that you may have. Then you have to figure out ways of getting around it. You have to take the idea, and change it to make it novel. If it's a good idea, you have to stay with it, and just try to change it to a way that you can get a patent out of it.

SVG: What do you think is the most exciting area of research in therapeutics or drug discovery in your field that you think is going to be lucrative and you would suggest to grad students or postdocs to look into right now?

Vischetti: I think using immunotherapies currently used for cancer could be targeted for infectious disease. No one's really taken that tack. All vaccines against staph infection target proteins. Unfortunately, these are quickly changed by the bacteria, which is why current vaccines are not effective. However, if you can target carbohydrates of the bacteria with a high affinity IgG in the sense of a nanobody, this may allow for efficient treatment. You make a nanobody against the carbohydrate determinant, and then the bacteria is going to have a problem. 

SVG: Do you think you had any mentoring or relationships within your career that allowed you to find your success or learn how to problem solve in an efficient way?

Vischetti: Luckily, I was in a laboratory of physicians. We always thought about disease and disease control. This allowed me to think about applications of basic science to disease.

What I lacked, which I always encourage all my postdocs to get, was an MBA. Science is big business. You will be able to take your science and move it out the door much more rapidly, VC will not take advantage of you, and your work will be developed much more efficiently.

Upcoming Events

Fellowships/Internships/Programs

New York Stem Cell Foundation - Data Scientist Intern
APPLY HERE Responsible for building custom pipelines to analyze and interpret biological data generated by teams within the NYSCF Research Institute. You are a good fit if you are a skilled data scientist who has knowledge and experience in working with machine learning, images, and have advanced Python knowledge.

• Commit 10 hours per month remotely
• Receive a competitive monthly stipend
• Work directly with impactful healthcare startups
• Learn about new cutting-edge technologies on the TechBio frontier
• Gain VC experience during a record-setting market (2021: $86B+ invested in healthcare startups and $28B+ raised by healthcare VCs) 

• Cell & Gene Therapy
• Immunology
• AI / Machine Learning
• Data Science
• Genetics
• Neuroscience
• Synthetic Biology
• Digital Health

This paid internship role is a remote position located anywhere in the United States.
Find additional information and apply here. MD, PhD, MBA 

Career Opportunities

Job Postings
Many great opportunities are available using IndieBio Talent Network. 

Also check out a variety of job posting with startups at BioLabs. 

Vivum Metabolomics
Reach out here to Vijay Soni if interested
Vivum Metabolomics is an exciting Weill Cornell Medicine-based startup harnessing the power of metabolomics for faster drug discovery and a better therapeutic combination. They are looking for ML/AI experts who can help us to develop an automated platform, using their datasets, to fish out and compare metabolomics profiles. They are developing their founding team and are looking for people at all levels. 

Qualifications: Knowledge of coding language R or Python, Standard ML supervised and unsupervised methods, Basic statistical analysis and using results to improve models, Training and retraining ML systems and models as needed.

Envisagenics - Senior Data Scientist
APPLY HERE The company uses artificial intelligence to help find cures to diseases caused by RNA splicing errors.
Responsibilities include applying the most effective and cutting-edge computational methods, including structural and physical modeling, machine learning, and data scientific approaches to advance drug discovery programs, spanning multiple modalities like antisense oligonucleotides, small molecules, and antibodies, and expanding machine learning capability, capacity, and application domains. 
Required skills: Strong proficiency in a programming language (Python or R) and SQL, expertise in machine learning libraries like SciKit-Learn; Caret (R) is also acceptable, but SciKit-Learn is preferred, expertise in a machine-learning platform such as TensorFlow or PyTorch, and strong sense of computer science principles, including data structures and algorithms.

Research & Design, Technical Operations, CDS @ Cellarity
Founded by Flagship Pioneering, Cellarity is designing medicines against the cell as opposed to a single molecular target. Our drug discovery programs are underway in metabolic disease, hematology, immuno-oncology and respiratory disease.
Learn more here about careers at Cellarity here. Additional information can be found here. 

Venture Fellow at DigitalDX
DigitalDx is an early stage impact venture fund that invests in digital health startups that diagnose illnesses earlier, less invasively, and more accurately. Currently seeking MD, JD, PhD, MBA, and Masters Candidates for the Summer 2022 Venture Fellowship. Venture fellows will gain experience in due diligence and market mapping among other skills. If interested, please refer to the application form for more details. The summer fellowship will begin June 11th 2022 and end on August 20th 2022.

New York Stem Cell Foundation 
NYSCF Research Institute is a non-profit accelerator looking to develop cures for the major diseases of our time through stem cell research and they have a few open positions. Join us for the networking event mentioned above!

Novartis - Senior Scientist, Protein Sciences
APPLY HERE You will join the Oncology Drug Discovery group, an early stage drug discovery team focused on understanding and exploiting the molecular mechanisms of novel cancer targets for the discovery, characterization and optimization of Oncology therapeutics. 
Responsibilities include Engineering, production and characterization of a diverse set of proteins for use in biochemical/biophysical assays and structure/function studies, development and implementation of emerging technologies with an emphasis on tools and techniques for generating proteins, peptides, nucleic acid and multi-protein complexes for use in drug discovery, and experimental design and analysis, interpretation, documentation, and presentation of data to the Biological Chemistry group and multidisciplinary project teams.
Requirements: Experience with recombinant protein expression using common expression systems (baculovirus experience highly desired) and knowledge of protein purification with different chromatography methods such as affinity, IEX and SEC.
 

What We're Listening To (or Reading!)

Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman 

Startup/Entrepreneurship resources in the Tri-I community: