The half-billion-dollar idea
It seems improbable that a PhD thesis would lead to a multimillion-dollar payday. But that’s what happened for Todd Zion PhD ’04, who worked tirelessly on a new type of diabetes drug as an MIT doctoral candidate — and for several years thereafter — and eventually sold that compound’s blueprints to a pharmaceutical giant. The progression from bench researcher to entrepreneurial success story, Zion says, took diligence, frugality and, in his company’s early stages, MIT’s resources for entrepreneurs.During the early 2000s, in MIT’s Nanostructured Materials Research Laboratory — then run by former professor of chemical engineering Jackie Ying — Zion began chemically modifying insulin for diabetics. The modified insulin would automatically adjust to fluctuating levels of blood glucose, requiring just a single injection per day. In 2003, he licensed this drug as SmartInsulin through MIT’s Technology Licensing Office and co-founded the company SmartCells to further develop the drug and turn...