Babson Wins First NIH Grant

Babson College’s Kerry Murphy Healey Center for Health Innovation and Entrepreneurship (KMH Center) received a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to create a program teaching entrepreneurship to scientists researching the overdose epidemic and substance use disorders.

The grant, the first from NIH to Babson, is expected to provide up to $1.5 million over five years, while the curriculum created is meant to increase the chance of new startups created to address substance abuse disorders.

The Babson team, including Professor of Marketing Vincent Onyemah, Assistant Professor Angela Randolph and led by KMH Center Faculty Director Wiljeana Glover, will develop a program to teach scientists how to use Babson’s trademark entrepreneurial thinking as they devise new evidence-based approaches to substance use disorders. They’ll also teach the new curriculum, which will be called Babson’s Life Sciences Entrepreneurial Product Development Immersion for New Technologies and Solutions (Babson L-SPRINT), over the grant’s five-year period.

The grant comes as the nation continues to grapple with an overdose epidemic while effective treatments for the disorder remain limited. More than 107,000 people died of a drug overdose in 2021, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Recent data from 2020 estimate that only 11 percent of people with opioid use disorder receive one of the three safe and effective medications that could help them quit and stay in recovery, according to SAMHSA.

Additional Babson team members on the project will be Gina O’Connor, PhD, Fischer Family Chaired Professor, and Professor, Innovation Management; Andrew Zacharakis, PhD, Professor of Entrepreneurship and the John H. Muller Jr. Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies; Philip Licari, Adjunct Lecturer, Operations and Information Management; Gemma Molins Gutierrez MBA’23, Research Assistant; Sandra Castaldini ’93, Manager, Office of Sponsored Research, Caren Goldberg MBA’95, KMH Center Administrative Coordinator, and Michele Bernier, KMH Center Associate Director of Programs.

Posted in Babson Briefs

Tagged Research, Entrepreneurship Education

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