Four of Atlanta’s leading health care and research organizations will announced the creation of a medical research “innovation center” to speed to market medical devices.
Georgia Tech, St. Joseph’s Translational Research Institute, Piedmont Healthcare and the Georgia Research Alliance will each put up $100,000 to launch the Global Center for Medical Innovation. The center will be housed at Technology Enterprise Park, alongside Georgia Tech.
Gov. Sonny Perdue formally unveiled the research and business incubator during the 2009 BIO International Convention at the Georgia World Congress Center.
The “innovation center,” which will initially focus on bringing cardiologic, orthopedic and pediatric devices and technologies to the marketplace.
The not-for-profit business incubator, which they label the first in the Southeastern United States, is expected to attract investors and medical-device companies — and keep Georgia-based inventors from taking their business, jobs and profits elsewhere.
“This will move us to the application stage of development, beyond the laboratory and the invention stage,” says Michael Cassidy, president of the Georgia Research Alliance. “We’ll be developing the ideas and ability to really scale up capacity so that [the inventions] will be attractive to industry.”
The initial $400,000 investment will be used to establish the center’s business plan. Investors are expected to pony up several million dollars later this year to create a prototyping center where medical devices will be test-driven.
Dr. Jay Yadav, chairman of the Piedmont Healthcare Center for Medical Innovation, says the public-private research and development center will pair doctors — who invent 80% of all medical devices — with engineers.
Doctors “are on the front line of taking care of the patient,” says Yadav, a cardiologist and CEO of a medical device company. “They understand the key problems and solutions. What’s missing is the engineering help, however, to turn these ideas into devices.”