Currently, commercial revenues from innovation translation represent a small fraction of the School’s total funding. And the majority of that comes from licensing the Johns Hopkins ACG System, a population health analytics software package used by governments, health systems, and others to predict patients’ health risks, manage their care, and improve their outcomes. With the ITC, the School aims to make that kind of translational success more common.
An entrepreneurial ecosystem is already taking shape. The University is investing in resources such as the Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures—home to the Pava Center and the health-focused startup accelerator HEXCITE. The School’s MPH/MBA program produces a steady stream of potential startup CEOs. And the growing list of School alumni who have founded companies represents a valuable source of mentorship to current faculty and students, as does the School’s Health Advisory Board (HAB), whose members hold leadership positions in industry, finance, and philanthropy.
“All the pieces of the puzzle are there,” says Colleen Cutcliffe, PhD ’03, a biotech entrepreneur who serves as an HAB representative to the ITC.
But cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset in a research and practice-focused institution will require a significant cultural shift, she says.
Phillip A. Sharp, PhD, an MIT biologist and Nobel laureate who helped launch Boston’s biotechnology hub when he co-founded the startup Biogen in 1978, says that a successful translational program will demand significant engagement with the outside world. “You’ve got to open yourself up to collaborations,” says Sharp, who notes that the Boston hub draws upon researchers, engineers, and physicians from MIT, Harvard, and Massachusetts General Hospital. “It will require them to integrate their interests and their talents with engineering schools, with computer science schools, with health care delivery systems.”
Fortunately, that collaborative ethos is part of the School’s DNA. “Public health is a team science; we play with people pretty well,” says Kirk, who envisions convening clinicians, data scientists, and public health experts to make meaningful changes to health care. Leung, meanwhile, is already exploring the possibility of partnering with the Hopkins Business of Health Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design to find ways of turning the School’s discoveries into real-world applications.
There are signs that the cultural shift has begun. When Kirk first came to the School more than three decades ago, getting involved with industry was viewed as “going to the dark side.” Today, he says, there is “a lot more receptivity” to entrepreneurial work. And Cutcliffe sees Leung, who was a postdoctoral researcher in Sharp’s lab at MIT and holds several patents related to molecular medicine, as an ideal evangelist. “He genuinely wants to help other people figure out how to turn their ideas into entrepreneurial endeavors,” she says.
Our goal was to get these devices out to as many people as possible. If that’s happening, then we’re happy.
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