Startups

Boston Children’s intellectual property has served as the foundation for numerous startup companies. Below is a selection of successful startups:

Circulation, a digital platform to coordinate convenient and reliable transportation across all areas of healthcare. John Brownstein, PhD, Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s is a co-founder of Circulation along with CTO Jared Hawkins, PhD, Director of Informatics at Boston Children’s, and CEO Robin Heffernan, PhD. Boston Children’s is also an investor in Circulation. Today Circulation is helping more than 1,000 health facilities across the nation improve patient access, outcomes and satisfaction with more reliable and efficient non-emergency transportation. Learn more.
Orchard Therapeutics is clinical-stage biotechnology company developing innovative gene therapies to transform the lives of patients with rare disorders. Orchard’s founders include F-Prime Capital and Scientific Advisory Board members from Boston Children’s Hospital (David Williams, MD and Luigi Notarangelo, MD), University of California Los Angeles and University College London / The Great Ormond Street Hospital. Learn more.
Boston Children’s Peter Laussen, M.D. conceived Etiometry’s web-based T3 Data Aggregation and Visualization software that captures and synthesizes massive amounts of patient data. The software is core to delivering predictive analytics to the clinical workflows, offering near real-time patient-specific assessment of clinical risk to ICU caregivers. Learn more.
Tim Springer, PhD, founded Morphic Therapeutic with collaborators from Boston Children’s Hospital to develop a new generation of oral drugs that advance therapies approved for treatment of multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, plaque psoriasis, acute coronary syndrome and complications during percutaneous coronary intervention. Learn more.
Emulate, Inc. creates living products for understanding how diseases, medicines, chemicals, and foods affect human health. Emulate’s founding team, led by Don Ingber, MD, PhD, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, pioneered Organs-on-Chips technology at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. Learn more.
Richard Malley, MD oversaw development of a streamlined, low-cost platform to produce vaccines, along with colleagues Fan Zhang, PhD and Yingjie Lu, PhD in Infectious Diseases. It was licensed to Affinivax for production of vaccines against infectious diseases that are particularly devastating among children in the developing world, including streptococcus pneumonia, pneumococcus and the agent of typhoid fever. Learn more.
Rebion (formerly REBIScan), cofounded by Boston Children’s Hospital chief of ophthalmology David Hunter, MD, PhD, commercially markets the Pediatric Vision Scanner, which offers a formidable tool for pediatricians to identify amblyopia, strabismus and other difficult to diagnose ocular conditions that frequently lead to vision loss in children. Learn more.
InVivo Therapeutics commercializes biopolymer technologies developed by Yang D. (Ted) Teng, PhD, MD of Boston Children’s to improve the quality of life for spinal-cord injury patients. Learn more.

 

Licensed Products

Boston Children’s has a demonstrated record of successful partnerships that have led to life-saving products benefiting patients worldwide. Learn more about some of our success stories:

Recombinant von Willebrand factor

Boston Children’s Stuart Orkin, MD and his then-fellow David Ginsburg, MD, first cloned the gene for von Willebrand factor more than 30 years ago. This discovery led to Vonvendi, the first drug approved for use in treating von Willebrand disease, a blood clotting disorder that occurs in up to 1 percent of the general population due to mutations in VWF. Learn more.

VONVENDI is a trademark or registered trademark of Baxalta Incorporated, a wholly-owned, indirect subsidiary of Shire plc.

EZ Board patient communication board

John Costello, MA, director of the Augmentative Communication Program, created a medical symbol set to help patients who are unable to speak or write legibly. The symbols graphically represent words and phrases related to hospitalization. Children’s has been using them since 2002, and in 2009 TIDO licensed the medical symbol set to Vidatak, LLC, which is distributing the set on patient communication boards and as an app in every major language to care providers around the globe. Learn more.

Tecniplast

Developed by zebrafish biologists Christian Lawrence and Isaac Adatto of Boston Children’s Aquatic Resources Program and the laboratory of Leonard Zon, MD, the iSpawn is a specialized breeding tank. Zebrafish are important for the rapid testing necessary to screen potential new therapeutics for patients with cancer and blood diseases and researchers investigating stem cells and genetic diseases. Learn more.

Dystrophin Diagnostic

Using next generation sequencing and analysis, this tool diagnoses muscular dystrophy based on research conducted by Louis Kunkel, PhD, Director of the Genomics Program in the neurobiology department. The analysis tool examines and detects sequence variations in 33 genes, including duplications/deletions in four of these genes. Learn more.