Unraveling the DNA of Technology-Based Businesses
By Robert Gunther
The Mack Center BioSciences Crossroads Initiative addresses the
real-time challenge of building businesses from life science research.
As Terry Fadem strides through
the hallway of the John Morgan
building on the campus of
Penn's Medical School, he pauses a
moment in front of a display case. He
points to what looks like a small sandwich bag with a few dots of color
embedded in it. While at DuPont several decades ago, Fadem had helped
take this self-contained diagnostic test
from the laboratory to the market.
This test, a breakthrough in medical
testing when it was developed, now
seems almost as quaint and anachronistic as the famous 1889 Thomas
Eakins painting of an operating theater that normally hangs just down the
hallway in the nation's oldest medical
school. Science has already progressed so rapidly that Fadem has
seen his work go from breakthrough
to commercialization to historical artifact in the course of a few decades.
And the pace is only quickening, driven forward by the lab work of more
than a thousand researchers toiling in
a rabbit warren of inauspicious-looking laboratories in more than a dozen
medical school buildings at Penn.
These labs are unraveling some of the
deepest secrets of life to create new
tests, cures and products that could
change our lives in fundamental ways.
"If I had to pick the place to be
that I consider the most exciting,it
is where I am sitting right now," said
Fadem in his office in the Morgan
building. "We are sitting at an intersection of two worlds."
Fadem, Managing Consultant of the
BioSciences Crossroads Initiative of
Wharton's William and Phyllis Mack
Center for Technological Innovation
(established through a $10-million
grant from William L. Mack, W'61) and
Director of Corporate Alliances at
Penn's Medical School, has one foot in
the world of research and the other in
the world of business. "In the past
few years, there has been this explosion of knowledge around biology—right here in this research building
around us," said Fadem. "But the
application to practice is a big concern. In the academic setting, if it
works on one patient, that is great.
But converting that to benefit hundreds of thousands or maybe millions
of patients is the challenge, and for
that you need a commercial partner. At
the medical school, we are looking at
a path on this side of the fence—what
are the scientific markers and the
research telling us? But there is expertise around the corner at Wharton
about the business and commercialization process. What are the markers
and mileposts along that path?"
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