Invention, innovation, entrepreneurship in academic medical centers.

Today’s healthcare providers deal with multiple very complex and pressing problems including the aging population, an ever increasing proportion of patients with chronic diseases, cancer deaths, childhood and adult obesity, escalating costs, regulatory interventions, as well as increasing responsibilities for patient safety. Innovation offers very important promises to address many of these problems. In most of the developed world, academic medical centers are charged with the mandate to treat patients and advance healthcare, and as such, should be poised to play a pivotal role in the process of innovation. In fact, there is an expectation for such innovation by the public given that interactions between academic medical centers and society rely on Federal funding for support intended to enable discovery in biomedical sciences. In 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act gave control of intellectual property generated based on inventions funded by the Federal government to universities, small businesses, and non-profit organizations. This Act further solidified the role of academic medical centers in innovation in biomedical sciences and healthcare [1]. As a result, the academic medical centers have become central to foster entrepreneurial culture by working with startup companies, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device companies to translate academic inventions into commercial products with societal impact. The increasingly tight relationship between academic medical centers and industry has resulted in more and more defined professional and institutional conflict of interest policies. These policies have especially targeted any financial incentives held by inventors [2, 3]. As much as the public has invested to put government-funded inventions into societal usage and has mandated academic medical centers to advance healthcare, the public assumes that the innovative process has not been biased by any financial incentives and that the patient care has not been compromised as a result. Professional and institutional conflict policies have been crafted to accomplish a balance between the support of the innovative process versus protections from harm. However to date, the balance has tilted without restraint toward risk aversion for the institution and away from support of innovation. The current study aims to identify critical steps from invention to applications, and the role of academic medical centers in this critical translation process. This study will not delve into the advantages and the disadvantages of conflict of interest policies, although they are essential to the balance between the support of the process versus an impediment to this process.