Q&A: Who is HSE?
Edited by Megha Gupta and Laurie Bishop
With its complex regulatory requirements, payment structures, and technical jargon, the barriers to launching a company or product in healthcare can be intimidating. But at Northeastern, students don’t need to tackle healthcare entrepreneurship alone. Formed in 2005, the Health Science Entrepreneurs (HSE) program was created by Joe Fleming and a group of Northeastern alumni and friends, in partnership with the Bouvé College of Health Sciences Development team, to support Northeastern students and alumni with their healthcare and life sciences innovations. Since 2019, the HSE team has been led by Laurie Bishop, a Northeastern alum (COE, ’91) and HSE’s Program Manager, who sat down with me to help walk through the role the Health Science Entrepreneurs can play in nurturing Northeastern-born health ventures.
Q: What does HSE do?
Laurie: The Health Science Entrepreneurs is a program designed to help anyone Northeastern-affiliated with their healthcare or life sciences ideas, from product ideation, launch, to commercialization and scale. To do this, HSE curates tailored mentoring teams that have the mindset of “mentoring the entrepreneur, not the idea,” to connect entrepreneurs and their innovations with relevant resources. In addition to support for existing ideas and early-stage ventures, HSE hosts a range of educational programs — webinars and classes, such as Entrepreneurship in Health Sciences, the cornerstone class for the new Health Sciences Entrepreneurship Minor.
Q: What would this look like for undergrads?
Laurie: For some students, healthcare ventures have actually been born in classes. One group of students in particular took Entrepreneurship in the Health Sciences, worked their way through funding from the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships and IDEA, and later completed I-Corps, which provides funding for entrepreneurs to focus on customer discovery. They’re doing all of this as full time students in classes or on co-op, and we’re supporting them through mentoring. We’ve had a few other undergraduate-born ventures too — like Dr. Brinsley, which works on chic diabetic footwear (started by Vidhan Bhaiya), and BurnCam, a telemedicine platform for burn care (founded by Orion Wilmerding).
Q: What’s behind HSE mentorship?
Laurie: To support different considerations healthcare entrepreneurs might need to make, we have a pool of over 100 mentors in the health and life sciences spaces, as well as a dedicated, core HSE team with an Entrepreneur-in-Residence and a volunteer Board. They come from backgrounds like biotech and med devices, IP law, venture investment, and clinical staff on the front line — so that when a venture approaches us, we can design our mentors around the specific venture and its needs.
When an entrepreneur or innovator comes to us with an idea, our team first evaluates the project and its current stage, to suggest resources for next steps. For early-stage startups, it’s really about figuring out what the real problem is and developing a viable solution people would actually want to buy. Customer discovery and market research are really critical, and programs at Northeastern like the Husky Startup Challenge, IDEA, and maybe I-Corps can help with this. For mid-stage startups, we might assign a more formalized mentorship arrangement and link ventures with I-Corps to continue discovery and development until launch. The HSE program gets involved with the entrepreneurs by really participating in their journey, making sure they have the right resources and mentors to push them along to what they can do in a very personalized, hands-on way.
Q: What about if someone doesn’t have an idea yet?
Laurie: We are excited about undergrad-produced ideas, but you don’t have to have an idea right away to get involved. HSE hires work study students, and we also have opportunities to volunteer at events or get involved as an ambassador; we are even exploring other co-op and bootcamp ideas for students. We bring together academia and industry every semester with our Curated Collisions events, with our last theme being AI and digital health tech. We’ve been hosting virtual speaker series as well, and welcome students, faculty and alumni of all ages to join us and get inspired!
Since its inception, HSE has helped over 100 ventures with health or life sciences concepts. Companies and ventures that have gone through HSE have raised well over $10 million of seed money across a wide gamut of innovations, from telemedicine to digital health to trends in data science and analytics. Today, HSE actively supports 20 companies on any given day, continually fostering healthcare innovation at Northeastern under the Bouvé College of Health Sciences’ vision to shift the needle from healthcare to healthspan. Ultimately, healthcare remains complicated. But whether it’s coming up with an idea or validating a solution and commercializability, the Health Science Entrepreneurs is Northeastern’s very own link between inspiration and action.
* conversation edited and paraphrased for readability
Learn more and connect with HSE via their website. A special thanks to HSE for their support and mentorship of ViTAL Northeastern throughout the years, across various dimensions and programming!
