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Digital Media & Film 28 Doing Business in Connecticut | 2015 of the restaurants and cultural activities. It's got a great vibe and it's a small city," says Jon Soderstrom, Ph.D., managing director, Office of Cooperative Research at Yale. "When I came here in 1996, not so much. Every day I wonder around, I say, 'Where did this come from?' It's really exploded in the last five years. And part of that is having students be more entrepreneurial." While Connecticut may never have the cache — and traffic congestion — of Boston and New York, the addition of e Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine to the UConn and Yale initiatives is fueling a criti- cal mass of research and innovation talent that is strengthening the state as a center for biomedical research, says Bruce Liang, M.D., interim dean for the UConn School of Medi- cine and director of the Pat and Jim Calhoun Cardiology Center. "It gets progressively easier to recruit talent," he said. "Talent will draw talent." UConn's researchers and investigators are developing new treatments for heart failure and a vaccine-based therapy to treat cancer. e cancer vaccine is in the clinical trials stage, but it's grabbing the attention of others in the field, drawing candidates from outside of the state, Liang said. Inventions like the vaccine "bring exper- tise to Connecticut," Liang says. "It's creating positions and jobs." CaroGen Corporation, founded in 2012 by a Yale pathology researcher and a pathol- ogy professor, will establish a laboratory at UConn's Technology Incubation program in Farmington because it provides an opportu- nity to collaborate with researchers at Yale and UConn. It's leveraging $500,000 in seed money received in October 2014 from the state's Connecticut Bioscience Innovation Fund to raise a targeted $7 million to $10 million this year to expand its research. UConn Tech Park e IPB building in UConn's Tech Park already has signed contracts worth $6 to $10 million each with Fortune 500 companies such as UTC, General Electric and Pratt & Whitney, says Lawrence K. Silbart, MPH, Ph.D., vice provost for strategic initiatives in the Provost's Office at UConn. Six additional industry proposals are at various stages of development. e partnerships already in place are the UTC Institute of Advanced Systems Engineering; GE Center of Excellence for Advanced Materials and Manufacturing; Pratt & Whitney Additive Manufacturing In- novation Center; Fraunhofer/DEEP Center for Energy Innovation; and Comcast Center for Computer Security, in association with the UConn Center for Hardware Assurance, Security and Engineering (CHASE); and the Department of Defense's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) for Nanoelectronics Security. ese agreements provide opportunities for professors and students to connect with industry, and for industry to capitalize on the latest research. While working with the School of Engineering, the Institute of Mate- rial Science, faculty in the Life Sciences and others, UConn is constantly prospecting for new partnership opportunities, Silbart said. He credited leadership at UConn and in the state government for these initiatives. "It has been quite rewarding working with the visionary leadership of the university (and) industry leaders who see the great potential in leveraging relationships between UConn scientists/engineers and the industries that will move our state's economy forward in high-tech manufacturing and other industry sectors," he said. "is could not be done with- out the tremendous support of the governor's office as well as our colleagues in the Depart- ment of Economic & Community Develop- ment, Connecticut Innovations and others." Healthcare Hackathon At a three-day "healthcare hackathon" in the fall of 2014, Yale's Center for Bio- medical and Interventional Technology (CBIT) hosted a team of physicians, hospital administrators, entrepreneurs and students to put their heads together and discuss how to reduce patient readmission to hospitals. Experts from UConn, Quinnipiac University, Yale and industry attended. e hackathon drew a highly interdisci- plinary group of students and professionals who wouldn't normally work together, said Chris Loose, Ph.D., executive director of CBIT. e center opened in the spring of 2014, and Loose, who cofounded an award-winning biomedical company while at the Massachu- setts Institute of Technology, joined in June. One invention that grew out of the hackathon was an alternative to an expensive, painful surgery used to remove a stent. e team came up with an idea that took less time and cost less than the current standard method. Another idea, inspired by a Yale student whose younger sister had recently developed type 1 diabetes, was to create a kid-friendly information packet to explain the chronic, life-threatening illness and make the treatment kit given to new patients less scary. Another way that Yale is stepping up its connection between theory and application is through the creation of two courses in medi- cal device design. In one, a team of students creates a solution to an existing medical problem. Last year, students designed a device to keep the intestines safe during a transplant operation, winning an award for the best biomedical device created by undergraduates in the country. e students are now working INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT › Education, Research & Technology > Continued from page 27 ' It gets progressively easier to recruit talent. Talent will draw talent. ' — Bruce Liang, M.D., interim dean for the UConn School of Medicine and director of the Pat and Jim Calhoun Cardiology Center