Unique partnership aims to get docs off drawing board, into marketplace

If you were to walk into Jeffrey Van Buren's physical therapy practice, you might see him working with clients using a self-designed platform that helps muscles react more quickly when presented with unexpected challenges.

Van Buren, who says he never envisioned himself as an inventor, now has dreams of getting his unique apparatus into the marketplace. And while that goal is still a dream, an innovative collaboration between his employer and TechColumbus is making it closer to reality every day.

Van Buren says his ah-ha moment came "six or seven years ago. I was reading an article in a textbook that talked about a large, movable platform that was built to study what muscles would fire when it was used. I thought that would be a great way to do therapy."

Since nothing like he needed existed in the marketplace, Van Buren, who works at OhioHealth's outpatient clinic in Westerville, drew up plans and built it. Since then, he's improved on the design several times and is using it in his practice.

Van Buren says he probably wouldn't be this far along if he hadn't learned about a two-year-old program between OhioHealth and TechColumbus to give OhioHealth medical professionals a forum for their ideas and help in commercializing innovations that have the best chance of success.

Today, he's negotiating a licensing agreement for his invention and is using the resources available through the partnership to gauge market potential, refine his invention and tap expert advice.

The collaboration represents the melding of two programs designed to help would-be entrepreneurs find the money and advice needed to put their inventions and innovative ideas into the marketplace.

One is the OhioHealth Research & Innovation Institute, established in 2006 to facilitate clinical research and innovation activities throughout the OhioHealth system. A year later, OHRI took on an additional role: to help medical personnel within the system commercialize great ideas that might not otherwise get a fair hearing.

The other organization is TechColumbus, a business incubator serving a 15-county region in central Ohio.

Burton Page, Sr. Director of Technology Commercialization for TechColumbus, says he knows of no other arrangement like it. In a nutshell, here's how it works: OhioHealth professionals who think they have a great idea fill out a questionnaire about their product or idea. That's followed by an introductory meeting before an internal panel, which asks further questions and decides whether the idea has the potential for commercial uses. If it does, the idea is sent on for review by a joint TechColumbus/OHRI panel that meets every two weeks. If that panel views the idea favorably, a decision is made as to what kind of help is the most appropriate, which may include resources needed for market analysis, coaching, funding, or other help.

"The process we've established is a commercialization model for negotiating, brainstorming and finalizing ideas coming through the OhioHealth Research & Innovation Institute," he says. "There are plenty of other commercialization programs for biomedical startups around the state, he says "but they are much more fragmented than ours."

Patricia E. Eisenhardt, OHRI's manager or commercialization, agrees.

"We're very different from a university system, where there might be a lot of great inventions, but when they come out of the lab, everybody asks 'what do we do with it?'"

Eisenhardt says the same holds true with most other hospital systems, where innovation may arise but no formal process exists for assessing market potential, hooking up with funders or helping the inventor build a team.

"The problem is this," says Wayne Poll a urological surgeon and Director of Innovation for OhioHealth. "When doctors or nurses have ideas, they don't know where to go. It's not necessarily the fact that this collaboration is one-stop shopping. . . but that the idea of farming out critical components is foreign to them � putting together a team, an attorney, a regulatory guy."

Poll should know. He says he spent 10 years cold-calling companies he thought should be interested in his innovative design for a self-cleaning laparoscopic lens, only to slam into brick wall after brick wall. (See our previous story on Poll's company here.)

While the collaboration between Poll's employer and TechColumbus came a tad too late to help Poll � his company, Minimally Invasive Devices, finally cracked the marketplace outside that process � he says other medical professionals will surely benefit.

David Sybert, chief of Riverside Methodist Hospital's anesthesiology department, recently signed a distribution agreement with medical giant Cardinal Health for 800,000 units of Linebacker, a strap that replaces tape used to secure IVs.

After conducting a market validation study, "I found out from Wayne Poll that TechColumbus and OhioHealth had started this program." While his company, Sybermed, had refined its flagship product prior to the formal OhioHealth/TechColumbus collaboration, "we were very fortunate to have TechColumbus assistance via coaching and mentoring, which is ongoing."

Sybermed benefited early on from a $47,500-TechGenesis Fund through TechColumbus, he says. Sybermed also recently moved its offices to the TechColumbus incubator.

Poll sums up the value of the program this way:

"Every doctor and nurse has good ideas. But 95 percent of those good ideas never get heard. Eighty or 90 ideas have seen the light of day during the last two years," he says. "That represents 80 or 90 people who previously had no idea where to go."