A group of graduate and professional students from across the campus are putting their diverse talents and education to use to help boost the local biotechnology industry.

The Yale students who comprise the Biotechnology Special Interest Group -- or the Biotech SIG, as it's known -- hail from the fields of business, law, medicine, public health and the biosciences. The group members provide consulting services to local biotechnology companies, and work with the University's Office of Cooperative Research to help develop the commercial potential of Yale research.

Unlike a professional consulting firm, however, the members of the Biotech SIG provide their services for free -- for, as they tell their clients, they're not doing this for the money, but for the educational value. "We're expecting to learn something, to gain skills, and meet people both at Yale and other companies," says the group's founder, Susan Brill, a sixth-year graduate student in physiology.

Brill has always been interested in the business side of science, and she became even more intrigued after taking a biotechnology course at the School of Medicine that featured prominent scientists who had started their own companies.

"There's a lot of excitement around what can be done intellectually and in an entrepreneurship sense with biotechnology," says Brill. During last year's Graduate Student Research Symposium, an annual gathering of Yale's bioscience community, Brill and other graduate students began discussing the possibility of forming a group to talk about the biotechnology industry.

"We thought we should get people together who have similar interests in this subject, but who could bring their unique training and perspective from the different schools," Brill says. For example, bioscience students could look at a biotechnology company's drug discovery strategy, while business students could look at the investment side, and law students could bring their expertise in issues concerning patent law, she explains.

Thanks to her experience on the campus-wide Graduate and Professional Student Senate, Brill was familiar with the SIG program at the School of Management (SOM), which encourages students to design their own curriculum by inviting speakers to campus and doing special projects. Having received approval for the SIG project and securing a modest budget, Brill and her cohorts began recruiting interested students at SOM, as well as the Law School, the School of Medicine and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Eventually, about 150 Yale students and postdoctoral fellows signed up -- about 75 to 100 of whom now actively work on the group's various projects.

Among those interested students was Brian Pinsker, a second-year SOM student who had had extensive experience and success as an investor in the biotechnology industry with Vector Securities and J.P. Morgan before coming to Yale. Although he got into biotechnology investing "by accident," Pinsker found it to be an exciting and dynamic industry, with tremendous investment potential -- as well as a field that will have an enormous impact on society as a whole in years to come. "As people live longer, as people are healthier, society changes and biotechnology is an area where you can see the change in society. It's pretty exciting," says Pinsker, who is now the co-coordinator of Biotech SIG.

Early on, the members of the Biotech SIG decided to focus their efforts in six areas: biotechnology consulting, investment analysis, curriculum development, New Haven biotechnology industry development, venture capital conference development, and web resources. Sub-groups focusing on each of these areas were formed.

In order to inform potential clients about its consulting and investment analysis services, the Biotech SIG sent brochures describing the group to eight local biotechnology companies, as well as Yale's Office of Cooperative Research (OCR). OCR was also supportive, seeing the group as a grassroots initiative that could help develop a biotechnology culture in New Haven. The OCR staff -- particularly Associate Director Ben Muskin -- has served as an important resource for the members of the Biotech SIG, giving them projects and introducing them to venture capitalists and people at local companies.

The consulting group is currently involved in seven projects, most of which involve market analysis or developing business plans for biotechnology firms. The investment analysis group currently has 10 projects, in which students are learning how to write an investment report like a Wall Street investor. These students expect to complete their first projects sometime in the spring.

Other groups within the Biotech SIG are at varying stages of development. The curriculum development group is designing a course for bioscience students who want to learn more about the business end of science. In the future, the group wants to explore issues such as an interdisciplinary curriculum for business, science and law students; joint Ph.D./M.B.A. degrees; and the relevance of business training in science. The venture capital conference development group is in the early stages of planning an international biotechnology conference in New Haven that would bring in top scientists and investors to discuss emerging technologies and investment opportunities. The New Haven biotechnology industry development group is interested in finding ways to facilitate the growth of biotechnology in New Haven and identifying potential challenges companies might face.

The group also maintains an active website (www.yale.
edu/biotech) which provides links to websites offering business resources and a list of upcoming seminars. The seminars are given by groups such as the Law School's Law and Technology Society and the M.I.T. Enterprise Forum, a group dedicated to promoting technology-oriented companies.

While the members of the Biotech SIG are expanding their own educational horizons through the group's activities, many are also bringing real-world experience to the projects they're pursuing for clients -- as some of the students are former professional consultants for firms such as McKinsey and Company or have headed their own companies. "For the same type of consulting work, it would cost the company six figures, so they're getting a good deal, and we're getting good experience and good contacts in the industry, so it's a good trade-off," Pinsker says.

While the members of the Biotech SIG have enough expertise to offer a range of services to clients, time is a major limitation on the kinds of projects they can tackle. Because of this, they tend to focus on "back burner" projects -- those where strict deadlines are not an issue. Because the group is still building its resources and contacts, the students also tend to focus on projects requiring analysis, rather than strategy. "When a company has ideas, we tend to evaluate their ideas instead of coming with new ones ourselves," explains Pinsker.

However, OCR's Muskin is hopeful that, as group members learn more about how the industry works, they'll be able to expand their services and become a major resource for local biotechnology companies. "This is a very important element to the biotech culture we're trying to stimulate here in the region," he says. "I hope it really takes root and grows."

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