By Abbey Lerner
Featured partner: BioTN
What: BioTN is a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote STEM education, bioscience innovation and bioscience entrepreneurship across the state of Tennessee to have a positive impact on human lives.
Established: 2007
Location: Nashville
BioTN’s work: The organization coordinates state-wide programming so that our growing science community has a space to “Learn. Grow. Build.”
Through funding provided by Launch Tennessee, BioTN conducts the Scipreneur Challenge, an academia-centric 12-week mock business challenge that engages students to build companies from unused intellectual property, and manages the Life Science Mentor Network, a systematic mentor program that helps develop Tennessee startups into becoming quality businesses.
The latest from the team:
— BioTN’s Fall Scipreneur Challenge is on the horizon. The program, which will take place from August to November, will be opening applications for program participants and intellectual property submissions on July 15, with programmatic dates to be announced soon thereafter.
— BioTN and members of its industry partner organization, Life Science Tennessee, will be hitting the road soon for Beer & Biotechs. The state-wide networking happy hours are for life science professionals to connect with colleagues in their markets while enjoying free food and drinks. It all kicks off this Fall with dates and details to be announced soon.
— Recently, Orion Therapeutics, a University of Tennessee at Knoxville startup company who had its technology used in the 2019 BioTN’s Scipreneur Challenge, has executed an option agreement with UTRF to advance the company in Knoxville.
— VoluMetrix, a Nashville-based biotech startup in the Life Science Mentor Network, was recently awarded $3 Million by the NIH SBIR Phase II-b grant to help develop the company’s non-Invasive heart failure monitoring technology, NIVA.
Failing Forward
Failing Forward with BioTN, as told by Cameron Snow at BioTN:
In late-2021 to late 2022, BioTN’s Executive Director Abby Trotter was tasked to be the interim CEO of Launch Tennessee. This was a great opportunity to engage more people from the life science and bioscience industry into Tennessee’s start-up and cross-sector technology communities.
The drawback was the potential strain on the BioTN team and the great programming we have built for the organization over the last several years.
Realizing the opportunity, BioTN’s team stepped up and committed to grow the Mentor Network and our Scipreneur programs, two programs in which we already had great leadership in Steven King and Bryan Barringer.
As for our other programs, we are just getting them relaunched. This includes our Academic Alliance, which is a program for graduate students to learn more about career opportunities and connect with life science professionals across the state.
Look for more information on these programs soon.