Fintan Walton:
Hello and welcome to PharmaTelevision News Review here at BioPharm America in Boston, in September 2011. On this show I have Erik Halvorsen, who is Executive Director of Technology and Business Development at the Children's Hospital in Boston, welcome.
Fintan Walton:
The Children's Hospital here in Boston is world recognized as a great hospital for children but also equally for it's innovation, your role in as Executive Director of the Technology Innovation Development Office in the hospital is really an important role, because it's part of that is to commercialize some of that great innovation that comes from within the hospital, could you just tell us a little bit about TIDO which is the your office basically and how that works?
Erik Halvorsen:
Sure absolutely, so I joined Children's Hospital about three and a half years ago as a Director of Technology in Business Development, at the time the office that I took over and managed was called the Intellectual Property Office which you know told you a little bit about the narrowness of what they were focused on and again the mission was a good one it was to sort of support the research and translate that research into new product and they actually had a very long history and have done a great job of that, but what we were seeing was that you know there was a lot of changes happening in the marketplace and in industry over the last 10-years or so and you couldn't just be patent focused in terms of supporting that mission and again so we had a sort of a simple mission which is translate the research in clinical innovation excellence of Children's Hospital Boston which is world renowned translate that into new products that can benefit our patients and the public at large and it's a simple mission statement, but certainly a very complex process. And so when I came into Children's Hospital three and a half years ago we were focused on how do we reshape this office to meet the new demands we have of supporting that mission, patents are certainly still the central part of what we do, we had a core sort of tech what you'll call a tech transfer office which includes people with advanced degrees in life sciences, and engineering, and with MBA's and business backgrounds as well that review that research evaluate it both on it's novelty, it's patent ability, understanding the market and what is ultimately the product and the path to get there. So we have that group at our sort of at our centre, but in addition to that we've created some additional functionality to really kind of support it and I think that's some of the novelty of Children's Hospital and how we've approached that compared to some of the other centres, so for example we've gone about creating the business development function and at least for us what that means because that word is used in a lot of different ways for us that business development function is focused exclusively on trying to form collaborations with industry either at the basic research level, the translational level or the clinical level, because we do quite a bit of clinical research and that involves doing kind of a needs assessment on both sides so we meet with lots of different pharma companies, biotech companies, diagnostics devices what have you and say what you're working on? Where are you? What are your products in development and what do you need, because ultimately even those companies can't do everything themselves and they need something whether it's samples, or cell lines, or something that they need to partner and move things forward. And then we do our own internal assessment, what resources do we have, what are our research areas and strengths and what do we need to kind of advance those things and then we make the introductions and connections where it's appropriate rather than doing kind of a shotgun approach and see what hits, we really have a little bit more of a personal touch I think with it and it's been very effective and we can talk some more about some of those collaborations that we've set up over the last couple of years. In addition to the business development component we also have a technology development component and what that is a capital fund that we have created within the hospital, we launched it little over two-years ago we are entering our third-year right now. This is an investment fund not a typical like ROI, VC type fund but to invest in home grown innovations and technologies that have yet to be licensed we invest in them to advance the stage development and add value to them de-risking them making them more interesting and attractive to the commercial partners whether they are big pharma companies or they are early stage investors who want to form a company around those, that fund has been very successful, we've invested in the first year we invested 1.2 million in about 10 projects, last year we did about 1.35 in about another 10 projects and we are geared up to do about the same level of investment. It sounds like relatively small money for a project about $150,000 per project but you can do that definitive study and really the thing that may be your academic researchers wouldn't typically do around so preclinical talks, or add new kinds of things, prototyping a device and so we outsource that stuff it's not stuff that we typically can do or wanna do so we take advantage of the wide range of expertise itself there are different CRO's and that's we generally partner with on those projects and it's the kind of data and things that again early stage investors and other companies wanna see before they license it, and so that's another function that we have. And then in addition to that we also have the clinical trials office, and so I think the lot of people don't recognize the really the amount of clinical research that goes on at an academic medical centre like Children's Hospital where we hold over 100 IND's and we do anywhere from 50 to 70 industry sponsored clinical studies or clinical trials per year at Children's Hospital , so very active in that group. So we have sort of all of those components under the umbrella of TIDO and so from the basic to the translation or the clinical it's all sort of there and we think it's important to again support that mission of translating our research into products.