Biotech SF: LEK Consulting

Ken Harrison.

A public-private partnership aimed at growing San Francisco’s biotech ecosystem has lost the leader of a core group of programs for the second time in its 1-1/2 years. Ken Harrison, who was entrepreneurship program manager at the QB3 institute housed at the University of California, San Francisco, took a job last month with L.E.K. Consulting. He had joined BioSF, the organization assembled last year by QB3, the mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development and the San Francisco Center for Economic Development, in January. In his role at QB3, or the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, Harrison oversaw the exploding Startup in a Box and Accelerator programs.

Some of my favorite stories.

• "The fight of his life" (2007)

Last year Mike Homer helped raise the money for 2,000 medical research computers. Now researchers are using that equipment in an attempt to save his life.

• "For reporter, CJD is more than a story" (2007)

Seven years ago -- nearly to the day -- my mother died of Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease.

• "A son's YouTube plea for Avastin" (2010)

Josh Turnage is your typical teenager, trying to discover what he wants to do in college and with his life. But a 7-minute, 41-second YouTube video he produced about his mother's fight with breast cancer may thrust him into a debate between drug makers and the agency that regulates them.

• "New device could knock out old dialysis technology" (2011)

Shuvo Roy has all the makings for the world's first implantable artificial kidney, thanks to nanotechnology and a web of nationwide collaborations.

All he needs now is $20 million.

Biotech SF

Thursday, October 4, 2012

'Startup in a Box' program loses leader to consulting firm