A systematic commercialization approach for academically developed biomedical innovations

Bringing biomedical innovations to commercialization requires a detailed navigation of the product development system on several challenging levels. Detailed knowledge of the product design from an engineering front combined with the proper application of the product to clinical scenarios, patent law application with proper funding, and marketing involve an enormity of complex systemic steps and policies that can make this an impossible task for academically inspired innovations of which the inventor typically has little knowledge or skills to achieve. Through the USC/Alfred Mann Institute of Biomedical Engineering, we have designed a company team, Med Tools, Inc, which includes specialists from several necessary disciplines to achieve this goal in a financially reasonable, timely and system comprehensive manner. The team includes patent lawyers, mechanical engineers, medical doctors in academia, and physicians with media/public relations who all raised an internal financial pool to begin the process and keep the company Board of Directors to a minimum of the original founders. After a meeting during which initial team's goals were discussed and capitol was raised, the design process between the engineers and physicians began, including aspects of how a physician would need a proposed product to perform clinically combined with what engineering aspects would have to be met. During the time in which several models were introduced, tested and reformatted by the engineers and physicians, the patent law specialists were busy tackling the process of patent application for the proposed models. In addition, through major AMI connections, marketing was investigated as well as proposed partners for product production. At this time, we have designed products ready for marketing and clinical implementation. For example the `Perineal Umbrella' an academic physician's original invention brought to fruition thorough the team approach which we have brought for demonstration purposes.