John Maraganore, CEO of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals; Penny Heaton, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute; digital health leader Pear Therapeutics; and renowned women-in-science advocate and MIT professor emerita Nancy Hopkins. These outstanding lea...
The 2nd annual Xconomy Awards Gala was a who’s who of Boston biotech. About 400 people from across the life science ecosystem came out to Boston’s Hynes Convention Center last month to celebrate the finalists over dinner and drinks, find out who got to take ...
This year’s nominees and finalists for the Xconomy Awards were even more impressive than last year’s (if that’s possible), making it that much tougher for our judges and the editors to pick the winners. There were multiple deserving winners in each category. B...
With so many stellar Xconomy Award nominees this year, we wanted to recognize several who don’t fit neatly into the other categories, so we’ve created categories just for them. One of these nominees for X of the Year is gaining influence in the drug industry wit...
Patients are supposed to be at the center of medicine, but the sheer size and complexity of the healthcare and life science industries often makes it challenging to maintain focus on patients. The finalists in this year’s Patient Partnership category of the Xconomy Aw...
[Updated 8/20/18, 4:47 p.m. See below.] Efforts to boost diversity and inclusion at life science organizations are themselves becoming more diverse. A growing number of biotech companies are adjusting their recruitment and hiring practices to ensure that their employee ...
Entrepreneur, scientist, doctor, startup founder, CEO, and in some cases, all of the above. This year’s Young Innovator award finalists—all 35 and under—have shown that they can do it all to try to translate an idea into new treatments or digital tools for...
Being a newcomer can mean a few different things: being new to the area (or newly back after being away) or new to an industry. The finalists for Xconomy’s Newcomer Award this year cover these definitions. One is a serial biotech entrepreneur who has now made an impac...
Our profiles of the finalists for this year’s Xconomy Awards roll on today with a look at the nominees for the Contrarian award. These finalists have been nominated for different reasons. One, for instance, may have paved the way for gene therapies to be commercially ...
Biology research has gotten so precise these days that scientists barely bat an eye when they talk about their ability to study the genome of individual cells or swap out single “letters” in DNA. So it’s probably no surprise that ultra-precise ways of measuring an...
We at Xconomy are excited to announce that we are honoring Nancy Hopkins, professor emerita at MIT, with our 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award. The award recognizes Hopkins’s career in genetics and cancer biology research, as well as her groundbreaking work advocating...
Healthcare is seeing an explosion in the use of data analytics, machine learning tools, wearable devices, mobile apps, and other digital technologies. Software products are not only augmenting the capabilities of doctors—in some cases, the digital product is itsel...
From artificial intelligence (A.I.) to materials science, this year’s Xconomy Awards finalists in the Innovation at the Intersection category are bringing a variety of disciplines outside of biology to bear on tough problems in life science. The hope is that advanced ...
This year’s bumper crop of Xconomy Award startup finalists cover a wide range of technologies and approaches, from microbiome and gene therapy to regenerative medicine and emerging areas like chromatin biology. Some are early stage, some are already in the clinic and ...
The Xconomy Awards are back, and today we’re kicking things off by taking a look at our first set of finalists—the top Boston biotech CEOs nominated by you, the readers. We’ve gone through all the nominations and come up with six finalists. Some of these CEOs ...
[Updated 6/28/18 5:20pm ET; see note below] There was discussion. There was debate. After much wrangling, the editors and judges have narrowed down the list of nearly impressive 300 nominees for the 2018 Xconomy Awards to an all-star group of 64 finalists in 11 categori...
Many of the judges of the 2017 Xconomy Awards came out to the Awards gala last September to find out who would take home our cool 3D-printed trophies, and they commented on how impressed they were with the finalists they got to judge and the winners they helped to pick....
Last year, the winners of the inaugural Xconomy Awards included a 30-year-old CEO of a young cell therapy startup commercializing his work from MIT (Armon Sharei; Young Innovator); a Dana-Farber oncologist who works closely with breast cancer patients as part of his res...
[Correction 3/1/18, 11:07am ET, see below] The Xconomy Awards are back for the second year! Today, we are opening up nominations for the 2018 Awards, which celebrate the best people, companies, and organizations in the Boston/New England life sciences community. The 201...
Vicki Sato has had a long career helping to lead major biotech businesses in Boston and then teaching Harvard Business School students how to create and grow high-tech companies. So it’s no surprise that when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wanted to figure out how...
How did Joan Reede, Harvard Medical School’s head of diversity, decide to pursue a medical career? Credit television. As a young girl, Reede says she was interested in nursing. Her aunt was a nurse and she thought nursing was a woman’s job. But while in junior high,...
[Updated, 2:45 pm ET, see below] Ed Kaye never thought he’d run a biotech —until waking up one day in 2015 realizing not only that he could, but that Sarepta Therapeutics, where he was chief medical officer at the time, may fall apart if he didn’t. In March 20...
Amy Schulman is relatively new not just to Boston, but also to biotech. Before she moved to Boston in 2014 to join Polaris Partners, she was a partner at a major law firm and then worked at Pfizer in New York, where she served as general counsel and also headed up its h...
[Updated 10/30/ 9:33 am ET to include news of the data release and new tweets, see below.] You only have to see a few tweets from patients with metastatic breast and patient groups to see how they feel about the Metastatic Breast Cancer (MBC) Project and its leader, Nik...
It was by accident that Armon Sharei first discovered the technology that his startup, SQZ Biotech, is now using to develop cell therapies for cancer. As a grad student at MIT, he and his collaborators developed a relatively quick and simple way to deliver large molecul...
In the Boston area, two major centers of academic cancer research are separated by the Charles River, which, as local residents know, acts as a barrier in many ways. On the Boston side, the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DFHCC) brings together researchers from seven...
In 2015, as Rob Perez (pictured) was leaving Cubist Pharmaceuticals, he knew that he wanted to do more to make a difference in the Boston community. As Cubist’s chief operating officer and president (and CEO, briefly, before Cubist was acquired by Merck), Perez had a ...
When Lita Nelsen first started working at MIT’s Technology Licensing Office (TLO) over 30 years ago, Kendall Square was home to only a few biotech companies, and spinning out new startups from MIT was more of an incidental thing (as she told Xconomy last year). But th...
We at Xconomy were thrilled to see such a great turnout at our first-ever Awards Gala—350 people from the Boston life sciences community filled a Hynes Convention Center ballroom. As Bob Buderi, our founder and editor-in-chief, said in his opening remarks on Septe...
We are excited to announce the recipients of the first-ever Xconomy Awards. Big Idea Bridge Project The Bridge Project was hatched by MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research in Cambridge and the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center in Boston to fund coll...
When it comes to trophies, plaques and gold cups are so 20th century. For Xconomy’s first-ever awards gala, we decided to make custom prizes for the winning Boston-area life sciences companies and individuals, using advanced design software and 3D printers. (See video...
Research that happens at the intersection of different fields can lead to new innovations that tackle pressing problems in the life sciences. This year’s finalists in the Innovation at the Intersection category show the value of bringing different disciplines—en...
For Xconomy’s first-ever industry awards gala, we wanted to make trophies that stand out and represent the winning Boston life sciences innovators in a fun and creative way. These days, it doesn’t get much cooler than making stuff with 3D printers. We partnered with...
Given the size and diversity of the life sciences community in the Boston area, we at Xconomy knew that many candidates would be so unique that they wouldn’t fit neatly into a category. So we gave them a category of their own. These finalists represent the wide range ...
[Corrected, 1:25pm ET, see below] All innovation and companies start off as an idea. Some will gain more traction than others over time, but we at Xconomy think that big ideas—and the people and companies in Boston’s life sciences community bold enough to try to...
[Corrected 12:20pm ET; see below.] The national debate over the high cost of healthcare, with prescription drugs at the center, resonates from the chambers of Congress to every American’s pocketbook. And it’s growing fiercer by the day. Last week, the first ...
The editors at Xconomy have been working hard the last few weeks putting together the program for the Xconomy Awards Gala. We are really excited to announce the two winners of the Xconomy Lifetime Achievement Award. Lita Nelsen, MIT (retired) Lita Nelsen (pictured left)...
Building a biotech business comes down to a lot of meetings and networking with potential new partners, hires, investors and others. Having all of these folks, along with top academics, highly concentrated in an urban center (that also has a lot of nice restaurants and ...
It’s clear at this point that patients are no longer just subjects in clinical trials. Thanks to the growing power of patient advocacy groups—and an FDA eager to hear their perspective—patients and drug developers are increasingly finding creating ways to ...
Innovation comes from a steady flow of new ideas, and the desire to remain innovative and competitive is driving many institutional efforts to boost student and workforce diversity. The Xconomy Award finalists in the “Commitment to Diversity” category span academia ...
The finalists in the Young Innovator category of the 2017 Xconomy Awards show that it’s never too early in life to start a company or invent a new technology. These four individuals (30 years of age or under) share a strong drive, even a restlessness, to build new thi...
Startups play a critical role in the innovation economy that we chronicle at Xconomy—transforming new ideas that begin in a lab into the products and companies of tomorrow. No surprise, then, that the startup category in our first-ever Awards program was a particu...
There are many ways to stand out as a biotech CEO, from getting a company started in the first place to pushing its first drug over the finish line. Those differences are what we noticed when going through the nominations from you, the readers, for the top Boston biotec...
The nominees for our first ever Xconomy Awards were an impressive bunch, and represent a wide range of the technologies, approaches, and yes, personalities, that are all driving Boston biotech today. There’s a lot of talent in this town, so narrowing the list of more ...
Venture funding in Boston and Massachusetts life sciences hit an all-time high in 2015, more than double the levels of 2006, and job numbers are projected to keep growing. Who is driving this phenomenal growth? We need your help in selecting the top innovators, startups...
By the end of this year, for the first time, patients with certain deadly types of blood cancer might have a new option, CAR-T cell therapy, to prolong their life. Immunotherapy could further entrench itself as a mainstay of cancer treatment. Newer drugmaking methods...
Like so much of the life sciences world, Xconomy has its roots in Boston and Cambridge. When the annual Biotech Week Boston convenes this September, we’ll be there, too, with our Life Science Disruptors forum, but also something new: The inaugural Xconomy Awards, ...