Compassion, curiosity, and coaching are the inspirational ecosystem of MN Cup Competition 2020 grand-prize winners Dr. Allison Hubel and her bio-team at BlueCube Bio. I am joined by Dr. Hubel and President and CEO Karen Dodson in an adventurous conversation to learn how they are creating technologies adapted from strategies used by nature to preserve cells during freezing, why Allison calls herself a random genetic mutation, and how their inspirational ecosystem works at BlueCube Bio. Leveraging critical thinking, research, mentoring, and relationships can be applied to your business. DOWNLOAD

We begin with how Dr. Allison Hubel witnessed a U of M graduate student suffering from leukemia and the complications followed by a toxic chemical used to preserve cells given during a lifesaving bone marrow transplant. His experience became a motivating factor for Dr. Hubel.

Three years later, Allison was sitting in her office on a cold winter day. As she gazed out the window, she wondered, “how do trees survive the harsh Minnesota weather?” This question engaged her curiosity.

A federal government grant was used to adapt strategies trees use to survive winter, to help cells survive cryopreservation. Significant research contributions by doctoral students Rui Li, now Director of Research and Development, and Katie Hornberger Director of Contract Manufacturing and Quality Assurance (CMC), BlueCube Bio has moved those strategies from the lab to the marketplace to help patients faced with life-threatening illnesses and coronavirus damage to the lungs. We discuss the details.

In the middle of our conversation, we discuss the MN Cup Competition (the largest statewide start-up competition in the country with 1,042 entrepreneurs participating this year), mentoring and coaching, compassion, and where they learned how to apply compassion to all relationships. Karen Dodson talks about how she joined the team, their vision, and their products (mCube and iCube). The collaborative journey between academia, research, biotech, and pharma communities could ignite some new ideas for expanding your reach to other industries.

We end with the Origin of the BlueCube Bio name. When Allison’s eldest son of three children was in preschool, she went in for the usual parent/teacher conference. The teacher said, “Your son is just such a unique individual and picked up a wooden cube in her hand. If I would put this up and show this to the class, most people would say it is a cube. Your son looked at it and said it is blue.” Allison says, “BlueCube Bio is meant to embody that curiosity and that unique eye that looks at a situation, in this case, cell preservation, and sees it through a different prism. We are working to take that prism, the prism of nature, and naturally occurring stabilization methods and apply that to cell therapy. We built curiosity into our name and our perspective and how we develop products.”

Karen finishes our conversation by encouraging young women to look at entrepreneurship. She says, “We see few women in entrepreneurial roles. Women are well suited to lead through change, are adaptive, and resilient.”