March

Read about the six lifescience and healthcare entrepreneurs we'll be following this week on twitter.

As a life science entrepreneur, you surely have ideas on how changing legal rules and policies could promote innovation and accelerate U.S. economic growth. The Kauffman Foundation, seeking suggestions on how to jumpstart the struggling economy, convened America’s leading legal scholars and social scientists to offer their thoughts.

The vision at Bioarray Therapeutics, a biotechnology company in Boston, is to improve cancer detection and treatment. By finding genes associated with cancer, the company is developing a diagnostic for breast cancer that can help doctors and patients choose the best treatment.

With U.S. healthcare costs rising about 2.5 percent faster than inflation, there’s an urgent need to improve productivity and quality in American healthcare. A Kauffman Foundation report found that open access to medical data could help find that cost-benefit balance.

As a biomedical informatics researcher and biotechnology entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley, Atul Butte has big ideas about the future of life science entrepreneurship. His Butte Lab works to solve genomic medicine problems through new developments in translational bioinformatics.

With Washington buzzing about the possibility of comprehensive immigration reform this year, a new Kauffman Foundation white paper showed how Startup Visas for foreign-born entrepreneurs could help jumpstart the economy.

Startups are not just a risk for investors. They are also a risk for the attorneys and other service providers that choose to work with them. That's because there's no guarantee an early-stage company will be around to pay a law firm for all the work it's done - let alone become a long-term customer.

With the goal of revolutionizing cardiac MRI, Morpheus Medical has developed software that takes the process from three hours to about 20 minutes. The company was launched about a year and a half ago when entrepreneurs who wanted to use computational processing to help with the diagnosis of disease came together with radiologists from Stanford University to commercialize the product.

With immigrants in more than 40 percent of the cancer researcher slots at America’s top cancer institutes, these scientists are playing an integral role in improving cancer survival rates in the United States, according to a Kauffman Foundation-funded National Foundation for American Policy report released last month.