KYLE O’REILLY

News Reporter

What do you get when you put law students, business students and biology students in the same room? Sit in on a meeting of Creighton’s Bioscience Entrepreneurship Program and you just might find out.

The Creighton University Bioscience Entrepreneurship Program is a one-year interdisciplinary program sponsored by the National Science Foundation. It brings together students from different schools of study to work to bring new medical technology to the market.

The program was started in 2008 when it received a grant from the National Science Foundation.

“The B.E.P. is an amazing program for students all over Creighton,” said director Anne York. “It’s able to take huge advantage of the three schools here at Creighton. You really have to know law, business and medicine to make it in this field. It’s essential. We’re making our students multilingual in that sense.”

The students in the program also find the different perspectives brought by all the majors to be important.

“It’s the brilliance of the program,” said Business senior Steven Kelly. “Working with different majors is just a taste of how the real world is going to be. On the other hand, the real plus of working with different majors is that everyone has a different perspective, usually coming from their major.”

“The multidisciplinary approach that Dr. York has taken with the B.E.P. program has really benefited everyone involved in the program,” said Andrew McLaughlin, a second-year Pharmacy student in the program.

“In my group, we have a biology major, a second-year Med. student, a third-year Law student, an MBA student and a second-year Pharmacy student – me. It allows everyone’s expertise to be utilized while also giving you the opportunity to learn something new about the field of bioscience entrepreneurship from a different perspective.”

The program accepts up to 16 students from all three schools. Throughout the program, the students are broken up into teams of five. They work together to create a product to be released to market.

“This year we have a lot of really interesting inventions from our three teams,” York said. “We have an app for the iPhone that helps with diabetes management.”

The inventions will be shown along with the students’ presentations to people from the community on Nov. 19 at a to-be-determined location.

The BEP program has brought numerous inventions to market and published articles in medical journals, but York said what really impressed the National Science Foundation when they evaluated the program for grant eligibility in early 2008, was how willing the three schools were to work together.

The deadline for applications for the spring semester was Sept. 30, but York said she is willing to accept late applications if “they were really going to follow through on it.”

Students in the program have reached their goals thanks to their experiences in the BEP.

“As I have gone throughout the BEP program, Dr. York has provided me with so many resources and, more importantly, an impetus for action,” McLaughlin said.