Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will talk about how to deliver cutting-edge biomedical innovations to patients in a lecture at MIT on Wednesday, April 2.
Gerberding's talk, sponsored by MIT's Center for Biomedical Innovation (CBI), is titled "Health System Transformation: Getting Our Money's Worth of 'Healthness.'"
Gerberding will touch on some of the challenges facing the U.S. health system, including rising costs of health care and the need to focus on prevention. She will also talk about how to translate biomedical advances into practical treatments for patients.
"It's very important when we talk about innovation that we make sure research innovations have an impact on the real world of patient care," said Gigi Hirsch, executive director of the CBI.
The lecture, which is open to the public, begins at 2 p.m. in Kresge Auditorium. Gerberding will be introduced by MIT President Susan Hockfield.
Gerberding will also participate in a roundtable discussion Wednesday morning with representatives from academia, industry and government.
The panel, called "The Role of Government in Health Innovation," will focus on how to pursue biomedical innovations in the face of lost government funding for health research.
"As government funding is cut, it will require new ways of moving forward, new models of collaboration, and new types of relationships across academia, industry and government," said Hirsch.
The panel, which requires advance registration, will be held in the Broad Institute auditorium from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m.
Moderated by Charles Cooney, the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, the panel will feature Randall Lutter, acting deputy commissioner of the FDA; Mark McClellan, director of the Engelberg Center for Healthcare Reform at the Brookings Institution; Alan Krensky, deputy director of the Office of Portfolio Management and Strategic Initiatives at the National Institutes of Health; Robert Langer, MIT Institute Professor; Phillip Sharp, MIT Institute Professor and Nobel laureate; Edward Roberts, the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology; Burt Adelman, former executive vice president for portfolio strategy at Biogen Idec.; and Fiona Murray, associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Gerberding's lecture is co-sponsored by MIT's Department of Biological Engineering, MIT's Center for Environmental Health Sciences and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST).
The roundtable discussion is co-sponsored by the MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT's Department of Biology and the New England Healthcare Institute.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 2, 2008 (download PDF).
