Four MD/PhD students who are executive board members of IDEA Labs have introduced their biomedical incubator to the scientific community through an article published in Nature Biotechnology’s October issue.
Tauseef Charanya (biomedical engineering), Stephen Linderman (biomedical engineering), Josh Seigel (neurology) and Avik Som (biomedical engineering), started IDEA Labs, a joint venture of the schools of Medicine and Engineering & Applied Science and the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences, in January 2013. As a group, they found that many technical challenges for physicians at Barnes-Jewish Hospital could be readily solved with a simple prototype, but there was no simple pathway to develop those solutions.
IDEA Labs, which stands for Innovation, Design and Engineering in Action, now exists to bring clinical problems to student teams and provide the resources for those teams to prototype a solution over the course of an academic year. IDEA Labs fits a unique niche at the very beginning stages of biotech and medical engineering in St. Louis, and serves as a vital precursor to the rest of the St. Louis startup ecosystem.
The paper is available here: http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v32/n10/full/nbt.3041.html