We recently caught up with the fine folks at the Myelin Repair Foundation, whose President, Scott Johnson, spoke at BIL:PIL 2009. Check out their message for the BIL:PIL community below:

This fall the Myelin Repair Foundation will be hosting two online “idea sourcing” events called “Breakthroughs to Cures” which are designed to explore creative ways to accelerate the pace of medical research and shorten the time to market for new medicines for all diseases.

The two events will take place respectively on October 7-8 and November 9-10 and are open to the public.

There will be as many as 600 individuals from a wide range of backgrounds (scientists, policy-makers, pharmaceutical companies, nonprofits, tech entrepreneurs) in online conversation threads that are expected to identify a wide range of new strategies for accelerating research.

We are looking for BIL:PIL’ers to participate who can bring new ideas to the table. If you are interested in playing visit http://info.breakthroughstocures.org starting September 7th to register for the first game on October 7th.

We believe this event will lead to perhaps the most cooperative and innovative solutions yet for breaking down the barriers that are slowing the pace of medical research and the development of new treatments and cures. Join us this fall!

About the Speaker
Dr. Daniel Kraft is a Stanford and Harvard trained physician-scientist with over 20 years of innovative biomedical research and clinical experience. He is an NIH funded faculty member with the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and is on clinical faculty with the UCSF pediatric bone marrow transplantation service.

Daniel’s research has focused on novel therapies involving stem cells, including understanding and manipulating the stem cell niche (recently published in Nature and Science). Daniel is the inventor of the recently FDA approved ”MarrowMiner” device for the minimally invasive harvest of bone marrow, and founder of StemCor systems, a clinical stage company which is developing the MarrowMiner and other tools and technologies to enable regenerative medicine.

About the Talk
A discussion of what insights can be learned by studying your brain’s activity during sleep.

About the Speaker
Dr. Philip Steven Low is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO, NeuroVigil, Inc. He’s also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford School of Medicine, and Research Affiliate of MIT Media Lab & The Salk Institute.

About the Talk
Today, doctors are manipulated by the fear of malpractice into recommending unnecessary procedures that individuals accept because of an information disadvantage. We have little compulsion to overcome this disadvantage because we are not the primary buyers of our own health care. The current position is untenable, and it’s in our interest to influence more systemic governmental change with the free market. There are models we can build off, and the first step to getting there is creating patient-advocates that possess the medical knowledge and fiduciary responsibility to allow their clients to decrease their personal costs and increase their quality of life despite a broken system.

Slides from the talk

About the Speaker
Tyler Willis is the Director of Marketing of Involver, which helps companies build audiences on social networks.
Personal Website

About the Talk
The Knife Edge Scanning Microscope (KESM) is a tool that allows high-throughput digital microscopy. It can take an entire mouse brain (or human tumor) and digitize it at a sub-micron level. Originally developed for analyzing long neural paths, it’s also excellent at tracing microvasculature in a sample. This technology has been under development for 10 years at Texas A&M, and is now being commercialized by Todd Huffman and his company, 3Scan, for many different industries including cancer research (angiogenesis inhibitors).

About the Speaker
Hello my name is Todd Huffman, and these are the things that I do…toddhuffman.pbwiki.com

About the Talk
Pillbox is a tool for rapidly identifying unknown pills. It combines high-resolution images of tablets and capsules with FDA-approved appearance information (imprint, shape, color, etc.) to enable users to visually search for and identify an unknown substance.

This is a great tool for poison control, doctors, or anyone who is trying to identify drugs based on pictures and/or descriptions.

Best of all, all the data is public domain and they’re building an API, which will allow other companies to build tools on top of it.

About the Speaker
David Hale works for the NIH as the Project Manager of Pillbox. Pillbox lies at the intersection of his interests: patient safety, biomedical informatics and user experience.

Personal Website | Twitter

About the Speaker

Chia Hwu is the Community Manager for 23andme and a former organic chemist. She has worked in biotech and tech, been a volunteer coordinator and online community manager at various start-ups. You can find her on Twitter (@chiah) and at her blog, The Subtle Influence.

About the Talk
The inspiration for The Pink Army Collective is open source software successes like Apache and Linux that compete with billion-dollar software giants. We believe open source biotechnology can do the same with big pharma, and we’re creating a community of professionals to build our own drug development company.

We’re focusing on breast cancer to start, and because we’re structurally different than any other biotech or pharma, we can take novel approaches to making medicines. In fact, rather than use the conventional drug development “pipeline”, famous for being slow and expensive, we’re championing a new system that we believe will be able to produce safe, effective, and individually personalized medicines quickly and inexpensively today, and be faster and cost even less as further improvements are made.

About the Speaker
I am a consultant-catalyst for open source biology, synthetic biology, the international Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) program, DIYbio, and open innovation models, with a focus on Canada. I am also faculty and co-chair of the biotechnology and bioinformatics track at the Singularity University.

About the Talk
In this BIL:PIL presentation, Scott Johnson, founder and president of the MRF, describes the high costs of the traditional medical research system (how it hurts individuals with chronic diseases through loss of productive years, loss of years in life, pain, cost to families) as well as the financial costs of the system.

Johnson then dissects how and why the research system is broken and how he tackled the problem with an outsider’s view, a “clean sheet of paper” and a plan.

About the Speaker
Scott Johnson is the founder and president of the Myelin Repair Foundation (MRF), which established the potential of myelin repair as an alternative to current immunosuppressant therapies for multiple sclerosis and is speeding up the process of bringing those treatments to patients through a new model for conducting medical research.

We would like to keep the BIL:PIL community involved throughout the year, and one of the ways we can help is by highlighting Kindred Events. The requirements for an event to be recognized are listed on the main BIL Conference page.

The first Kindred Event we’ll feature is from the SD Biotech planning committee.

Gary Ridge, CEO of WD-40, will be speaking at the PGC200 launch event on November 12, from 6-8:30 pm at Amylin Pharmaceuticals in San Diego.  PGC200 is a nonprofit learning community for life science professionals to advance their careers and develop servant leadership skills to adapt and stay relevant in a rapidly changing global landscape.  Attached is the event flyer with more information.

PGC200 Launch Flyer