About the Center

In June 2005, MIT's Center for Biomedical Innovation hosted more than 125 prominent stakeholders from industry, government and academia, including key experts from the FDA and the NIH. Together, we outlined a bold biomedical research agenda targeting areas where breakthroughs would have important and immediate impact on healthcare innovation, productivity, regulation and practice.

From this rich collaboration, CBI was launched to address the profound challenges confronting the biomedical industry. CBI is a collaborative effort across the Schools of Science, Engineering, and Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), government agencies involved in healthcare, and the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. 

In 2008, MIT’s Program on the Pharmaceutical Industry (POPI), merged with the Center for Biomedical Innovation. Designated a Sloan Industry Center, POPI was founded in 1991 with a major grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to promote research and educational activities on issues related to competitiveness, performance and productivity in the pharmaceutical field.  For more information about POPI, click here.

Research at the CBI is focused on optimizing biomedical innovation through collaborative effort in several research areas, including:

  • Safety assessment
  • Manufacturing and distribution systems
  • Economic, financial and regulatory risk management
  • R&D redesign

CBI will succeed in addressing these challenges by:

  • providing a “safe haven” environment where experts in academia, government and industry focus on pre-competitive biomedical issues
  • establishing collaborations between world class academic researchers at MIT and other academic institutions, government agencies involved in healthcare, and industry experts
  • developing and disseminating new knowledge and tools designed for real world application within the healthcare industry
  • leveraging geographic proximity to both top pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and teaching hospitals, which together provide ready access to the full continuum of resources from bedside-to-bench