Cleveland Clinic’s tech arm sees strong returns on therapeutics

Coming into his role as executive director of Cleveland Clinic Innovations, Geoff Vince wanted to make a big splash. 

“(My plan was) really to blow it up,” said Vince, who took the helm at the health system’s commercial arm in 2021.

Related: Meet the companies delivering therapies through smartphones

In Vince’s two-and-a-half years with Cleveland Clinic Innovations, the organization has undergone an innovation itself, which includes the implementation of a new structure and a growing emphasis on therapeutics and digital health. 
 

The changes seem to be paying off. The group's translation rate for invention disclosures to licenses improved from 19% in 2021 to almost 34% in 2023, according to the Clinic. 

Vince, who hails from England, originally joined the Clinic’s biomedical engineering department in the early 1990s.

In 2000, he developed an imaging algorithm that measures cholesterol in a patient’s heart. The Clinic licensed the technology to a San Diego-based company named Volcano Corporation. Vince consulted with Volcano for several years before departing the Clinic to work for the company full-time.

Keep up with one the industry’s fastest growing sectors. Sign up for Digital Health Intelligence.

When Volcano was acquired by Philips in a $1.2 billion deal, Vince returned to the Clinic to serve as chair of the health system’s biomedical engineering department. He said his background working with startups and developing new technologies made him a good fit for Cleveland Clinic Innovations, which has more than 2,500 issued patents, 45 active startups and 26 exits.

Shaking things up became a key part of Vince’s strategy at the beginning.

“The traditional way of doing innovations is you have one person who’s expected to do everything for a lot of the technologies,” he said. “They’ll talk with an inventor. They’ll do marketing. They’ll do a licensing deal. They’ll do product development. They may even help spin out a company.”

The problem with that approach, Vince said, is that one person doesn’t have the skill set to do all of those tasks.

Not a Modern Healthcare subscriber? Sign up today.

“You can’t be expected to do everything for 30 people,” Vince said. “What I did is I broke it up into a team of teams. We have five teams who work in individual areas and as a technology goes through our system, it gets handed off to a team with a particular expertise in that area.”

Among those teams is an engagement group that works with inventors to mine ideas and build relationships. It also includes teams focused exclusively on license deals and invention disclosure forms, which Vince described as the numerator and dominator driving translation rate.  

“It has been a breath of fresh air having (Vince’s) approach and his way of organizing the structure of the group,” said Dr. Shaun Stauffer, director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Therapeutics Discovery.

Stauffer’s group works to translate scientific discoveries made by Clinic researchers into novel therapeutics. It focuses primarily on developments in neuroscience and oncology. The group has worked closely with Cleveland Clinic Innovations on several projects. Stauffer said the relationship has blossomed over the last several years. 

Along with structural changes, Cleveland Clinic Innovations has expanded its efforts in therapeutics and diagnostics and digital health. In the past, the organization largely concentrated on medical devices (80%), but a growing percentage of its work has centered around other areas.

Today, the organization’s portfolio is 48% medical devices, 31% therapeutics and diagnostics and 21% digital health. It includes groups such as segmented reality med-tech company MediView XR Inc., Enspire DBS Therapy Inc., which is developing deep brain stimulation plus rehabilitation for stroke patients, and Anixa Biosciences Inc., a company developing a breast cancer vaccine.

Download Modern Healthcare’s app to stay informed when industry news breaks.

The timelines for developments in these areas vary greatly. It can take decades and hundreds of millions of dollars, for example, to develop a new drug, while digital health innovations tend to move at a much faster pace. With therapeutics, researchers must go through clinical trials to ensure a molecule is safe and efficacious prior it becoming a marketed product, a process that can take up to eight years, Stauffer said.

Return on investment might happen more quickly in other areas, Stauffer said, but it’s important to serve the needs of patients in a variety of ways. 

“We recognize that we need to reach all our patients,” he said. “In therapeutics, it’s something that we realize that prior to this group it hasn’t been a systematic effort to do that. Hopefully, with the investment in our group and what we’re trying to do, we’ll be able to change that and contribute to therapeutics as part of our mission.”

Having a mix allows for a balanced portfolio, said Vince, who estimated that Cleveland Clinic Innovations has three or four companies that could potentially exit for more than $100 million in the next two years.  

“It's a new Innovations,” Vince said. “What we have now is a scalable process … it’s more along the lines of those business product development timelines, less of an academic endeavor and more of a business endeavor.” 

This story first appeared in Crain's Cleveland Business.