'SkunkWeeks' venture seeks to speed time to market
Dubbed SkunkWeeks, the collaborative program “helps companies both partner with pharma as well as succeed in their market-driven goals of commercialization,” Amrit Chaudhuri, CEO and Co-Founder of Mass Innovation Labs, told us.
“The SkunkWeeks program is an opportunity to not only disrupt the way that innovation is perceived and handled at larger organizations, but also an opportunity where thought leaders can actually execute those changes,” he added. “When major organizations have the chance to slightly tweak their thinking, it can truly change the way they do their work.”
Together, Chaudhuri said the companies are able to provide “a start-to-finish look at how therapeutic development can be changed in the pharma industry.”
The first SkunkWeeks was held in September and included two leading global pharmaceuticals companies who came up with “game-changing” ideas, according to Chaudhuri. The second SkunkWeeks event is being held at the end of November.
“We’ve realized that organizations that are working on different projects, whether it’s early stage research or taking a new drug to market, have a traditional model that they’ve always followed for the last twenty years,” Chaudhuri commented.
“Fundamentally, we believe that there are better ways of innovating and that it needs to be a collaborative approach.”
‘Bench on Demand’
Also this week, Mass Innovation Labs announced three new resident companies that have entered into its “Bench on Demand” laboratory space for early-stage biopharmaceutical and life science companies.
The new residents include, EdiGene, a startup focusing on genome editing technology, Kernal Biologics, a biotechnology company developing mRNA therapeutics and mRNA vaccine development, and Helix Nanotechnologies, a biotechnology company working on DNA nanotechnology, software, and DNA sequencing.
