Grand Opening of Medical Device Center

University officials gave a preview of the new center earlier this week, which is located inside the Mayo Building on the University of Minnesota campus, replacing the old location in the University’s Shepherd Labs that opened in 2008.

The Medical Devices Center (MDC) at the University of Minnesota is an interdisciplinary program that sits within the Institute for Engineering in Medicine and combines basic research, applied and translational research, education and training, and outreach and public engagement all related to medical devices. The MDC brings together the University of Minnesota´s expertise from the Colleges of Science and Engineering and the Academic Health Center (Colleges of Medicine, Dentistry, Veterinary Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy)

With this move to its new 8,000ft² home, the MDC aims to strengthen interdisciplinary research among faculty in the health sciences and engineering specifically related to medical devices. The center will help train the next generation of medical device inventors and foster new relationships with the successful Twin Cities medical device industry and various government agencies in an effort to improve health care worldwide.

One of the crown jewels of the Medical Devices Center is the Innovative Fellows Program, which began in 2008. The goal is to train the next leaders in medtech by fostering leadership and teaching risk management for medical devices. The MDC teaches the Fellows disciplined product development, which includes FDA Requirements, Insurance Reimbursement, Intellectual Property, and Business Strategies in addition to Creativity Techniques and Prototyping.

The Fellows spend their first few weeks in a series of Educational Rotations presented by thought leaders in the College of Science Engineering, School of Medicine, Academic Health Center, law firms, surrounding med-tech industry, venture capitalists, and angel investors. They then spend several weeks in a period of Clinical Immersion, where they put on scrubs and stand in the periphery of operating rooms and clinics, observing MD’s, nurses, and associated technicians at work.

After collecting unmet clinical needs, they will define the problem from all angles, using clinical literature as a guide. The Fellows work with UMN faculty collaborators from both engineering and medicine and interface with University technology transfer and licensing groups. They will innovate around unmet clinical needs for the duration of the fellowship. This includes multiple sets of prototyping cycles and bench top testing.

In addition, the fellows teach, share and learn by mentoring undergraduate and graduate student design teams from across the College of Science Engineering, support the Design of Medical Devices Conference, and interact with the College of Design’s Product Design Program.

The Medical Devices Center provides a unique environment with extensive prototyping equipment, support staff and interface with the University of Minnesota Medical Center, Fairview. MDC Innovation Fellow sponsors are offered preferred access to both the new facilities and to novel new intellectual property.

The Innovative fellows have been very successful, generating 104 invention disclosures since 2008, 52 of which came from the 2012 class alone.

Art Erdman, PhD is a long-time University of Minnesota mechanical engineering professor and director of the MDC. Dr. Erdman has been a faculty member at the University since 1971, and holds more than 30 patents, many for medical devices. Dr. Erdman has collaborated with faculty in many departments within the Academic Health Center.

The Medical Devices Center, the Institute for Engineering in Medicine, and the College of Science and Engineering has robust industrial advisory boards with leadership from Medtronic, Inc., Boston Scientific Corporation, St. Jude Medical, 3M, Minnetronix, AMS, and many other leaders in the medical device industry. These relationships help us to train tomorrow’s innovators and collaborate on ongoing research projects.

The MDC has many roles within the U of M including:

• Train the next generation of innovators through the Innovative Fellows Program
• Acceleration of interdisciplinary medical device Research and Development 
• Distribute funding for creation of new medical devices based on a peer review process
• Focus on projects needing a boost to achieve national prominence and/or generate important Intellectual property
• Create a Core Lab with common use equipment for creative prototypes
• Facilitate connections to other Centers and Labs
• Support U of M functions related to medical devices
• Support the teaching/training programs of departments related to medical devices
• Actively interface with the medical device industry
• Focus on improvement of health care worldwide