Getting to know the IPO
What is the Intellectual Property Office?
Children's Hospital Boston's clinical and research staff are highly trained and experienced medical experts, and they often come up with ideas that can improve their daily work lives or the field of medicine. The IPO evaluates those ideas, decides if they're feasible and finds companies that might be interested in making them available to the public.
How do you make an idea into reality?
It can take tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to get a medical product, like a new medication, to market. But it's not just money. You need to have the correct infrastructure to do it effectively. So the IPO identifies companies that bring the needed expertise in management, product development, clinical research, regulatory affairs, manufacturing, marketing and distribution, and tries to sell them on developing a Children's idea into a valuable product.
How are the goals of academic medicine and for-profit business in conflict?
One example is that for-profit companies are inherently secretive, while academics are inherently publication driven. Many businesses think they should control the publication of results of studies they've funded or delay them for their own purposes. But the careers of academic people are partially dependent on how often and rapidly they publish on their research. And the hospital would never tolerate, for example, constraints on its right to publish negative data from a clinical trial.
So in order to manage the competing demands of a for-profit capitalist system and an academic institution whose missions are research and caring for children, we have to educate each side on the other's needs. That means letting businesses know the importance of protecting the hospital's fundamental academic and clinical nature, while educating researchers and clinicians about legitimate intellectual property concerns essential for developing a product that could benefit all involved.
What other challenges do you face?
A big challenge is that the ideas coming out of Children's are at a very early stage of development. Children's faculty and staff do research, not product development. We need to file patents before results are published so we don't impede the academic process. These results, while scientifically significant, don't present the product feasibility data that companies want to see. So we're promoting ideas that aren't as fully tested as the technologies that one company may license from another.
Another challenge, and one of the toughest, is that the traditional IPO approach doesn't work very well for pediatrics because of the small and challenging nature of the market. There aren't many children with heart disease, for example, which is great news. But since there are so few, it's tough to get a company interested in spending the money to develop technology for kids with heart conditions because the company may not see a financial benefit.
What is the IPO doing to address this problem?
We've set up a special unit within our department to develop products and medications exclusively for the pediatric market. If a Children's clinician or researcher comes to us with an idea that we feel has potential, we've set up the infrastructure to do much of the up-front work on products or ideas that a company might do—including design, development and testing—then find companies to produce and market them. We hope this will remove a lot of the financial risk that keeps companies from developing products or medications for children.
How do you find out about the ideas?
The IPO staff works hard to develop relationships with our scientists and clinicians and encourage them to share the ideas they think have the potential to improve medicine. We also actively seek out ideas with our Product Imagination Forums, which are a series of brainstorming sessions where nursing and patient care staff can share the needs they have and the challenges they face in delivering care. We bring in engineers and business consultants to transfer those needs into product opportunities. Our hope is to make these regular events because we know there are great ideas out there, and we want people to let us help them make those ideas a reality.
How successful has the IPO been?
In 1998, we launched a growth plan to do a better job mining the institution for ideas, and become a self-sustaining and profitable business unit. Seven years later, we receive more inventions per research dollar than most research institutions and have several products being sold for public use. Our revenues have grown steadily to the point where last year we generated $14 million. Some of that is shared with the outside patent owners and some goes to inventors and their departments, some pays for the costs of doing business and the balance goes into the hospital's research endowment.
Of course, I hope we'll have a blockbuster that brings in hundreds of millions of dollars. But until then, my goal is to run the IPO as a small, increasingly profitable business that performs a valuable service and provides clinicians with products they need to optimize the care of our patients.
You have a very diverse staff. How does that help you do your work better?
The best talent comes in all kinds of packages, and you need diversity of background to find the best solutions. Our 16-person staff are from seven different countries and represent nine different ethnic groups; 11 have PhDs, three have MBAs; and they have education or work experience in industry, teaching, diagnostics, biotech, corporate law, academic medicine, business development and marketing. So at our case management meeting every week, we talk about new inventions, do an analysis of the technology, evaluate the business and intellectual property situations, and make recommendations. It's a great opportunity for people from a variety of backgrounds to debate and look at a puzzle from all angles.
