Cleveland Clinic (CC) and its partners Case Western Reserve University, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, The Ohio State University and University of Cincinnati have a longstanding commitment and documented success in transitioning laboratory and clinical innovations into dramatic improvements in patient care, CC alone, via its commercialization arm CC Innovations (CCI), has generated 53 spin-off companies and $644 million in equity financing in the past decade;however CCI has a focus on more mature programs and does not reach back into the research pipeline. Also, contributing to commercialization success of the applicant institutions has been the establishment of the state-funded Global Cardiovascular Innovation Center (GCIC) that has a mission of advancing late-stage cardiovascular innovations, i.e., """"""""shovel ready"""""""" opportunities with rapid job creation potential. The applicant consortium has now come together to address an unmet need by proposing a new Center (Cleveland Clinic Innovation Accelerator, CCIA) with an overall goal of propelling early-stage projects forward and educating researchers to be full partners in transforming their discoveries into high-impact advances in patient care. The proposed Center will enhance and coordinate the existing resources of the five partnering institutions to advance the very strong pipeline of laboratory discoveries and technical innovations generated every year in NHLBI mission areas (over 250 NHLBI-funded projects). This application has three specifics aims: (1) To create the CCIA - a self sustainable, multi-institutional consortium focused on translating early innovations in NHLBI mission areas into advanced solutions for improving global patient care. CCIA will complement the mission of the GCIC by reaching earlier into the discovery and development pipeline in order to address the gap between discovery research and validation/pre-clinical development. (2) To select through rigorous peer-review commercially promising NHLBI funded projects that will receive funds and expert project management. Projects shall span the technology range of diagnostics, devices, therapeutics and tools. (3) To create a nationally accessible institute for educating and mentoring researchers, clinicians and developers in biomedical innovation and entrepreneurism. The Center will provide experience-based training to cultivate a growing cadre of commercially successful innovators. Generation of the CCIA will thus create a self-sustainable engine for propelling a large pipeline of NHLBI-related research discoveries into advances in human health.
