NIH and NSF collaborate to accelerate biomedical research innovations into the marketplace
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS –The Innovation Corps (I-Corps) @ National Institutes of Health (NIH) program to help commercialize life science innovations, a process known as translational medicine, launched Oct. 6 in Bethesda, Md. in association with UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
The goal of the program is to bring innovations such as improved imaging for cancer surgery or drugs with fewer side effects to market “with lightening speed, ” says Steve Blank, Berkeley-Haas lecturer and National Science Foundation (NSF) principal investigator, who developed the I-Corps curriculum and is teaching the pilot program using methods taught in his Lean LaunchPad course.
I-Corps @ NIH is a branch of the NSF I-Corps that teaches scientists the same Lean Startup techniques that have revolutionized how thousands of startups worldwide are now being built. The Lean LaunchPad method discards traditional business plans for Lean Startup techniques such as customer development, agile development, and the use of the “business model canvas” to track how a startup tests its hypotheses.
This first I-Corps @NIH cohort includes life science and healthcare teams focused on therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. Each team is a funded company that has received an NIH SBIR Phase 1 grant.
The 21 NIH teams are learning how to:
• Define clinical utility before spending millions of dollars
• Understand core customers and the sales and marketing process required for initial clinical sales and downstream commercialization
• Assess intellectual property and regulatory risk before they design and build
• Gather data essential to customer partnerships/collaboration before doing the science
• Identify financial vehicles before they need them
UC Berkeley is part of the NSF I-Corps Bay Area Regional node along with UCSF and Stanford University. The Bay Area node, one of seven I-Corps nodes, trained 93 startup teams last year.
“We’ve combined the cutting edge of what we’ve learned about entrepreneurship with the best of National Research Labs. Hold on to your hats because we’re all in for one heck of a ride in a wave of new science startups,” says Andre Marquis, executive director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at Haas and a member of the I-Corps @NIH teaching team. Also teaching the course is Jerry Engel, Berkeley-Haas emeritus adjunct professor and former Lester Center executive director.
According to Blank, I-Corps has become the U.S. standard for commercializing science, training 400 teams of this country’s foremost scientists from the NSF, Department of Energy, and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. The approach prompts scientists to get out of their labs and speak to potential customers. Nationwide, participating scientists have spoken to over 40,000 customers to test over 15,000 business hypotheses.
“The future of translational medicine at the NIH is Lean – it’s fast, it works and it’s unlike anything else ever done,” says Blank. “In the end we’re going to create new companies that bring life-saving drugs, devices and diagnostics to clinicians and patients faster and cheaper.”
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