ENGS 15.13 Vaccines, Drugs, and Entrepreneurship

This course will introduce students to how new vaccines and drugs are developed and delivered to patients by scientists, industry, and entrepreneurs. This course will also examine new opportunities to improve speed, scale and access to new medicines that are not just commercially viable, but socially valuable. To tell this story, we will follow the development of Covid-19 vaccines from the initial discoveries made in protein, nucleic acid, and nano-material engineering, the transfer of these technologies into entrepreneurial venture capital-backed startup companies like Moderna and BioNTech, and their development into novel vaccines that saved millions of lives.  We will examine the technical, clinical, business, and marketing/educational, and policy strategies that determine the development, access, and acceptance of these new vaccines and drugs.

A key feature of this course is a student team project in which students use entrepreneurial thinking to design a comprehensive development plan for a novel biomedical product candidate that employs engineering, business, and social science strategies identified throughout the term. The objective of the plan is to design, test, manufacture, and sell a safe and effective product that will be both accessible and acceptable to the end-user population. By the end of the course, students will be able to analyze the biotechnology landscape, identify promising biomedical venture opportunities, understand effective business strategies, and identify strategies that can enhance the social value of these ventures. Students will emerge from this course with a deeper understanding of unique challenges and opportunities inherent in biotech entrepreneurship.

The Timetable of Class Meetings contains the most up-to-date information about a course. It includes not only the meeting time and instructor, but also its official distributive and/or world culture designation. This information supersedes any information you may see elsewhere, to include what may appear in this ORC/Catalog or on a department/program website. Note that course attributes may change term to term therefore those in effect are those (only) during the term in which you enroll in the course.

Department-Specific Course Categories

Engineering Sciences