Designing Disruptive Business Models For Unmet Medical Need

An Interview With In Vivo Rising Leader Michael Hufford

An undergraduate class in abnormal psychology and a lifelong interest in technology helped to set Michael Hufford on a career path that now includes the co-founding of five companies. As CEO of Harm Reduction Therapeutics, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company, Hufford hopes to make a cheap, OTC version of naloxone widely available to help prevent unnecessary deaths from opioid overdoses.

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Michael Hufford, currently co-founder and CEO of both LyGenesis, Inc., an organ regeneration biotech, and Harm Reduction Therapeutics, Inc., a company working to bring the opioid overdose drug naloxone over the counter, set out initially on an academic track. Hufford received a master’s degree and PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Pittsburgh, before becoming a clinical research fellow in the department of psychiatry at Harvard’s McLean Hospital. At McLean, Hufford had the opportunity to “dive into the deep end of the pool” of severe psychiatric comorbidities and saw first-hand how many patients were “falling through the cracks of our ability to care for them as a society.”

After becoming a professor with his own lab, where he trained undergraduate and graduate students, Hufford joined invivodata inc. in...

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