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  “It was exciting to me to realize that I could take what’s going on in academia and turn it into something that gets into the hands of thousands and, ultimately, millions of people by using technology.”

  Marnie LaVigne

  director of business development, Center for Advanced Biomedical and Bioengineering Technology

By JULIE WESOLOWSKI

Published: November 19, 2008

Think of Marnie LaVigne as the woman operating behind the proverbial bioinformatics curtain in Western New York. As director of business development at the UB Center for Advanced Biomedical and Bioengineering Technology at UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, she is responsible for creating new partnerships among academia, industry and government that benefit Buffalo Niagara.

She admits she’s never taken a business course in her life, so it’s no surprise that LaVigne took a nontraditional route to her current position at UB. She attended the University at Rochester initially as a pre-med major, but found psychology more to her liking. Continuing as a graduate and Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Rochester, she was especially interested in applying behavior-change principles in health care in areas like smoking cessation and particularly in projects that involved the community. She completed her master’s project and doctoral thesis working with the American Lung Association and the occupational health program at Eastman Kodak.

It also was during her time as a graduate student that LaVigne started her family. She credits a Rochester female faculty member in behavioral medicine and health psychology for being her mentor. A mother herself, her mentor was one of the few people LaVigne could look to as a role model on how to balance motherhood, graduate school and her Ph.D. coursework. “I watched how she was in academia and how she was involved in a private sector business and had a family,” she explains.

It was this same mentor who offered LaVigne a position as chief scientific officer at a start-up business that involved turning traditional one-on-one smoking-cessation counseling into an automated program that could reach broad audiences. At this company, LaVigne quickly went from being a clinician and scientist to being an entrepreneur. “I just did whatever needed to be done. That’s what you do in start-ups,” she says.

Although it initially raised $2 million, the start-up wasn’t able to get additional financing and ultimately transitioned into a new firm that had an initial public offering within two years of its incorporation. These experiences introduced LaVigne to her calling. “It was exciting to me to realize that I could take what’s going on in academia and turn it into something that gets into the hands of thousands and, ultimately, millions of people by using technology,” she says.

LaVigne went on to work with a number of start-up businesses involving innovative technology in health care, including large pharmaceutical companies (Bristol-Myers Squibb), medical devices (Welch Allyn), managed care (Aetna) and medical informatics (Medscape, now WebMD). During this period, she spent much of her time commuting from Buffalo to Rochester, then to New York City and oftentimes even the West Coast.

It was her desire to spend more time with her husband and children that led her to find a position in Buffalo in 2000. After a meeting with Bruce Holm, executive director of the Center of Excellence, during the early stages of the new bioinformatics center, she began working on a number of opportunities to engage business partners with the Center of Excellence. Eventually using her consulting experience in academic-industry collaboration, she began working for BuffLink, a private sector, nonprofit group that also shared the interest in growing the life-science economy through collaboration. Through BuffLink, her involvement with the Center of Excellence increased dramatically so that even before it moved into its headquarters on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus in 2006, she took on the role of director of business development.

LaVigne finds her job at the Center of Excellence exciting because it involves translating research into practice for the betterment of the population and the economy of the region as well. “It’s truly a privilege apply my background working with so many accomplished and dedicated individuals,” she said. “I can’t imagine a more rewarding combination of professional and community involvement.”