The backbone of Venture Café – come meet the community and make connections with all different kinds of innovators. How will you make your serendipitous moment come true?
Start your night with this quick overview of Venture Café, what we do as a community, and how you can make the most of our weekly Thursday Gathering! Bring a friend, grab a drink, and plug in to the ecosystem - it's time to connect, learn, and share.
With so many news stories about space exploration and the ways companies are considering development opportunities beyond Earth, questions remain. What opportunities exist in space for commercialization? What's next in commercial space, defense, AI, and dual-use technology? On Thursday, September 17, 2026, One Way Ventures and Venture Café Cambridge will host MIT researchers, space founders, investors, and global aerospace and defense leaders for a discussion covering these topics and where the biggest opportunities are emerging.
The panel draws on perspectives spanning foundational research, global strategy, entrepreneurship, and venture capital. Paulo Lozano, PhD, M. Alemán-Velasco Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Director of the MIT Space Propulsion Laboratory, brings the science pushing propulsion and space technology forward. Jinhee Tak, EVP and Head of Strategy Planning at Hanwha Aerospace & Systems, speaks from inside a major global aerospace and defense organization. Shishir Bankapur, Founder and CEO of Helogen, offers a founder's view of building in the space. Jon Bronson, PhD, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at J2 Ventures, adds an investor's perspective on where capital is flowing. Moderator Rhie Lim, Partner and Host at One Way Ventures and Kendall On Air, guides the conversation across these vantage points.
Whether you're a founder building in the space, an investor scouting the next big bet, an engineer or researcher pushing the technology forward, or simply someone fascinated by where this industry is headed, this session is built for you.
Biotech is advancing faster than ever, but persistent challenges in clinical trial recruitment, representative data, patient access, and trust continue to slow the path from scientific breakthrough to real-world impact.
This panel discussion will explore why traditional approaches to community engagement often begin too late and what it would look like to build trusted community infrastructure before recruitment or commercialization begins. Using Roxbury as a real-world case study, panelists will examine how biotech, healthcare, technology, government, and communities can create stronger pathways to research participation, better data, broader adoption, and ultimately better outcomes.
The question for biotech leaders: What if community trust were treated with the same strategic importance as the other infrastructure required to bring innovation to market?
We're inviting biotech marketing and commercialization leaders to join us for an interactive roundtable on building and evolving value messaging as evidence develops, ensuring it resonates with the specific decision-making stakeholder, whether that's a clinician deciding whether to prescribe or a health plan Medical Director weighing access and coverage.
Led by biotech marketing gurus, Asha Strazzer-Wild and Kelly Wilder, this peer-driven conversation allows participants to trade real-world experience.
Topics will include:
- Sequencing value messaging from development through commercialization
- Identifying the evidence that matters most to different stakeholders
- Tailoring messaging to specific personas and the decisions they make
- Communicating a consistent value narrative as evidence and audiences evolve
Come ready to talk about what's working, what gets missed, and how to make evidence-based messaging more relevant to the people making prescribing and access decisions.
Join us for an evening where Japanese deep tech meets Boston's life sciences community. Seven Japanese biotech companies and university research platforms, spanning antibody discovery, RNA and artificial nucleic acid therapeutics, and AI-powered cancer diagnostics, present live at CIC Cambridge, all pre-screened through Hiroshima University's startup selection process.
Meet the founders and researchers building a miRNA therapeutics platform (PURMX Therapeutics), hard-to-target antibody discovery (iBody Inc.), and a non-coding RNA target discovery platform (Cloverna Inc.), alongside university teams from Hiroshima University (host-free DNA synthesis and vaccine manufacturing), Tohoku University (artificial nucleic acid therapeutics for multiple myeloma), Nagoya University (AI-powered diagnostics for pancreatic cancer), and OIST (peptide therapeutics for Alzheimer's disease).
The evening opens with welcome remarks from the Consulate General of Japan in Boston and a look at NINEJP's Japan Innovation Hub initiative, followed by rapid-fire pitches from all seven teams. Then join us for an hour-long poster session where you can talk one-on-one with founders and researchers, dig into the science, and explore licensing, co-development, or investment opportunities directly.
Whether you're a VC scouting early-to-clinical-stage biotech or a pharma or medtech corporate looking for IP structured for licensing or co-development, this is a rare chance to engage with Japan's next wave of life sciences innovation, all under one roof in Cambridge.
An Open Forum hosted by Mirror Physics
Let’s go beyond chatbots and explore AI agents for real scientific workflows.
In this workshop we’ll explore how agentic tools can accelerate drug discovery across the entire span of preclinical work: searching published literature and patents, generating novel compound candidates, hit-to-lead optimization, ADMET screening, designing efficient laboratory experiments, and everything in between.
Making an agent genuinely useful in drug discovery requires more than access to a powerful model. We’ll discuss what AI agents are, how they differ from conventional chatbots, what goes into effectively leveraging their capabilities, and what we think is most exciting about this emerging technology.
Bring your laptop! Through hands-on drug-discovery examples, we’ll explore reliability and human verification, security and privacy, context and scaling limits, and the tradeoffs between quality, speed, and cost.
Bring your drug discovery questions, preclinical pipeline struggles, and pharmaceutical expertise and try out agentic tools first-hand.
Who Should Attend
This workshop is especially relevant for:
- Scientists working in preclinical drug discovery
- Computational and medicinal chemists
- Biologists working with computational teams
- Biotech founders and pharma R&D executives
- Scientists interested in incorporating AI into existing research workflows
No AI or machine-learning expertise is required, just a computer.
About Us
Mirror Physics builds AI agents for drug discovery.
Our product, Axon, combines frontier AI models with scientific tools and computational infrastructure to aid scientists working on all stages of preclinical drug discovery.
The backbone of Venture Café – come meet the community and make connections with all different kinds of innovators. How will you make your serendipitous moment come true?
Start your night with this quick overview of Venture Café, what we do as a community, and how you can make the most of our weekly Thursday Gathering! Bring a friend, grab a drink, and plug in to the ecosystem - it's time to connect, learn, and share.
With so many news stories about space exploration and the ways companies are considering development opportunities beyond Earth, questions remain. What opportunities exist in space for commercialization? What's next in commercial space, defense, AI, and dual-use technology? On Thursday, September 17, 2026, One Way Ventures and Venture Café Cambridge will host MIT researchers, space founders, investors, and global aerospace and defense leaders for a discussion covering these topics and where the biggest opportunities are emerging.
The panel draws on perspectives spanning foundational research, global strategy, entrepreneurship, and venture capital. Paulo Lozano, PhD, M. Alemán-Velasco Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Director of the MIT Space Propulsion Laboratory, brings the science pushing propulsion and space technology forward. Jinhee Tak, EVP and Head of Strategy Planning at Hanwha Aerospace & Systems, speaks from inside a major global aerospace and defense organization. Shishir Bankapur, Founder and CEO of Helogen, offers a founder's view of building in the space. Jon Bronson, PhD, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at J2 Ventures, adds an investor's perspective on where capital is flowing. Moderator Rhie Lim, Partner and Host at One Way Ventures and Kendall On Air, guides the conversation across these vantage points.
Whether you're a founder building in the space, an investor scouting the next big bet, an engineer or researcher pushing the technology forward, or simply someone fascinated by where this industry is headed, this session is built for you.
Biotech is advancing faster than ever, but persistent challenges in clinical trial recruitment, representative data, patient access, and trust continue to slow the path from scientific breakthrough to real-world impact.
This panel discussion will explore why traditional approaches to community engagement often begin too late and what it would look like to build trusted community infrastructure before recruitment or commercialization begins. Using Roxbury as a real-world case study, panelists will examine how biotech, healthcare, technology, government, and communities can create stronger pathways to research participation, better data, broader adoption, and ultimately better outcomes.
The question for biotech leaders: What if community trust were treated with the same strategic importance as the other infrastructure required to bring innovation to market?
We're inviting biotech marketing and commercialization leaders to join us for an interactive roundtable on building and evolving value messaging as evidence develops, ensuring it resonates with the specific decision-making stakeholder, whether that's a clinician deciding whether to prescribe or a health plan Medical Director weighing access and coverage.
Led by biotech marketing gurus, Asha Strazzer-Wild and Kelly Wilder, this peer-driven conversation allows participants to trade real-world experience.
Topics will include:
- Sequencing value messaging from development through commercialization
- Identifying the evidence that matters most to different stakeholders
- Tailoring messaging to specific personas and the decisions they make
- Communicating a consistent value narrative as evidence and audiences evolve
Come ready to talk about what's working, what gets missed, and how to make evidence-based messaging more relevant to the people making prescribing and access decisions.
Join us for an evening where Japanese deep tech meets Boston's life sciences community. Seven Japanese biotech companies and university research platforms, spanning antibody discovery, RNA and artificial nucleic acid therapeutics, and AI-powered cancer diagnostics, present live at CIC Cambridge, all pre-screened through Hiroshima University's startup selection process.
Meet the founders and researchers building a miRNA therapeutics platform (PURMX Therapeutics), hard-to-target antibody discovery (iBody Inc.), and a non-coding RNA target discovery platform (Cloverna Inc.), alongside university teams from Hiroshima University (host-free DNA synthesis and vaccine manufacturing), Tohoku University (artificial nucleic acid therapeutics for multiple myeloma), Nagoya University (AI-powered diagnostics for pancreatic cancer), and OIST (peptide therapeutics for Alzheimer's disease).
The evening opens with welcome remarks from the Consulate General of Japan in Boston and a look at NINEJP's Japan Innovation Hub initiative, followed by rapid-fire pitches from all seven teams. Then join us for an hour-long poster session where you can talk one-on-one with founders and researchers, dig into the science, and explore licensing, co-development, or investment opportunities directly.
Whether you're a VC scouting early-to-clinical-stage biotech or a pharma or medtech corporate looking for IP structured for licensing or co-development, this is a rare chance to engage with Japan's next wave of life sciences innovation, all under one roof in Cambridge.
An Open Forum hosted by Mirror Physics
Let’s go beyond chatbots and explore AI agents for real scientific workflows.
In this workshop we’ll explore how agentic tools can accelerate drug discovery across the entire span of preclinical work: searching published literature and patents, generating novel compound candidates, hit-to-lead optimization, ADMET screening, designing efficient laboratory experiments, and everything in between.
Making an agent genuinely useful in drug discovery requires more than access to a powerful model. We’ll discuss what AI agents are, how they differ from conventional chatbots, what goes into effectively leveraging their capabilities, and what we think is most exciting about this emerging technology.
Bring your laptop! Through hands-on drug-discovery examples, we’ll explore reliability and human verification, security and privacy, context and scaling limits, and the tradeoffs between quality, speed, and cost.
Bring your drug discovery questions, preclinical pipeline struggles, and pharmaceutical expertise and try out agentic tools first-hand.
Who Should Attend
This workshop is especially relevant for:
- Scientists working in preclinical drug discovery
- Computational and medicinal chemists
- Biologists working with computational teams
- Biotech founders and pharma R&D executives
- Scientists interested in incorporating AI into existing research workflows
No AI or machine-learning expertise is required, just a computer.
About Us
Mirror Physics builds AI agents for drug discovery.
Our product, Axon, combines frontier AI models with scientific tools and computational infrastructure to aid scientists working on all stages of preclinical drug discovery.