Where does innovation come from? How can R&D discoveries can be translated into new ventures? This fireside chat hosted by TAPP fellow Livio Valenti will discuss the journey of a scientist and an entrepreneur in bringing new scientific breakthrough from the lab to those who need it the most.

At first glance, scientists and entrepreneurs might seem very different. However, over the past few years these groups have started to collaborate more closely. This unusual, interdisciplinary “couple” made a bet on building companies based on scientific discoveries, developing electric cars, exploiting novel therapeutic modalities (mRNA) and launching rocket ships. A a result, venture capital began to pour billions of dollars into this new approach, now called “deep tech”.

Some of these new ventures will fail. Others will take a long time to deploy at scale. But what if you could make safe, unlimited energy from nuclear fusion? Develop clean steel from hydrogen? Reinvent food that does not spoil, or seeds that can grow in the desert? Or make a vaccine that doesn't need refrigeration and can be delivered with a painless skin patch?

Decarbonizing society, mitigating and adapting to climate change, building more efficient healthcare systems, modernizing transportation, agriculture and energy, they all require science-based technologies to be deployed at scale. In this fireside chat Livio Valenti will discuss how entrepreneurs and scientists can continue to work together advancing breakthrough discoveries to market.

Livio Valenti, Technology and Public Purpose Fellow

Livio Valenti is a sustainability entrepreneur leveraging scientific discoveries to build innovative companies in the healthcare, biotechnology and material science field.

He is the co-founder of Vaxess Technologies, a biotechnology company developing a new class of vaccines that can be delivered with a silk-based skin patch. These vaccines do not require refrigeration and can be self-administered by patients, regardless of where they live. The technology was licensed from Tufts and MIT. Livio is also a co-founder and founding board member of Mori inc. a company based in Boston fighting food waste with a novel approach based on silk coatings. The underlying technology was licensed from Tufts and MIT. These ventures raised more than $150mn from venture capital and via Government grants, pioneering a new, sustainable model of company creation in collaboration between investors and the Public sector.

Livio is a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, Wire Magazine Top Innovator under 35, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a TEDx speaker and an affiliate with the Aspen Institute. Livio was previously an economist at the United Nations in Cambodia, where he worked with farmers to build the foundation of the silk industry in the country. He graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (USA), Bocconi University (Italy) and Fudan University (China).

Speaker

Professor Fiorenzo Omenetto is the Dean of Research, Tufts school of Engineering, and scientific co-founder, Vaxess Technologies and Mori, Inc. Fio was formerly a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratories.

Fiorenzo G. Omenetto is the Frank C. Doble Professor of Engineering and a professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University. He is the Dean of Research for the School of Engineering and holds secondary appointments in the Department of Physics and the Department of Electrical Engineering. He has proposed and pioneered the use of silk as a material platform for advanced technology with uses in photonics, optoelectronics, and nanotechnology applications. He is co-inventor on a number of disclosures on the subject and is actively investigating applications of this technology base for both technical and design applications. Omenetto was formerly a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratories and a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and of the American Physical Society. In 2010, Fortune magazine named him one of its 50 smartest people in tech.

Fiorenzo Omenetto's research interests are at the interface of technology, biologically inspired materials and the natural sciences, with an emphasis on new transformative approaches for sustainable materials for high-technology applications. The Silk Lab has pioneered the use of silk as a material platform for photonics, optoelectronics, and high-technology applications, and is actively investigating novel applications that rely on this new technology base.

More info: https://www.belfercenter.org/event/la...