Christopher M. Coburn, vice president of innovation of Boston-based Partners HealthCare, is positioning the state's largest healthcare system to lead the charge to commercialize more of the technology developed in its teaching hospitals, according to the Boston Globe.
As with many other hospitals and universities, Partners is looking to expand partnership with the biopharmaceutical and medical device industry as federal funding for medical research shrinks. Since 2010 when funding from the National Institutes of Health peaked at $31 billion, research funding for medical institutions has decreased by about $1 billion, according to the report. NIH provides about half of the research budget for Partners.
Mr. Coburn's goal is to guide Partners' $1.5 billion research department to work closely with the industry to provide patients with drugs and treatment more quickly and to double the $80 million Partners earns from licensing agreements and spinoff companies, according to the Boston Globe.
While partnering with the industry could lead to increased funding, hospitals and other institutions must diligently avoid conflicts of interest. According to the report, some have raised concerns regarding the independence of scientific investigators and their ability to research and share findings that companies may not like.
"You have to be careful that industry isn't directing the research, that they're allowing investigators to have academic freedom," Mark Chalek, chief of business ventures of Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center told the Boston Globe.
Partners began focusing more attention on commercializing research about two years ago when funding started to decline. In 2013, it hired Mr. Coburn, who had previously worked with Cleveland Clinic where he founded its innovations office and served as its leader for 13 years. Now, Partners' innovation office has five-times the research budget of Cleveland Clinic and 80 employees working to commercialize treatments for orthopedics, surgery and radiology, among other fields.
Getting Partners researchers who have little interest in the corporate world to want to work with companies has proved challenging, however. Partners has taken a number of steps to encourage researchers, including speaker events in which successful researchers tell the story of how they were able to advance their projects through working with industry, as well as a $1 million grant program for promising research practice with commercial applications, according to the report.