2009 Cleveland Clinic Innovation Summit will include a heavy dose of health-care reform

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Clinic launches its annual Medical Innovation Summit today with this year’s focus on great things yet to come in the field of cancer.

But the reform-minded tenor of the times also will shape this year’s conference. Along with offering insight into cutting-edge cancer treatments and predicting the greatest medical innovations of 2010, the conference will host U.S. Food and Drug Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg and hear from 14 CEOs from companies including AstraZeneca, IBM, Merck, Novartis and Schering-Plough.

“You’ll be hearing from folks right in the crucible,” said Chris Coburn, executive director of Cleveland Clinic Innovations.

The core of the three-day conference, in its seventh year, is to highlight challenges in a specific speciality that intrigues the health-care profession and the medical industry. But the discussions would largely gobsmack the public, and in many cases focus on topics years away from reaching the bedside. This year, there is a live broadcast of a robotic kidney removal surgery and a seminar titled, “The Market for Consumer Genotyping in Oncogenomics.”

Even the annual list of Top 10 Medical Innovations — meant to point out influential innovation for the following year — usually highlights only a handful of topics that can take several years to gather steam.

But this year’s conference carries more immediate impact than most because of a focus on a topic with the scope of cancer, the challenges of health-care reform and the current state of Big Pharma. Many of the leaders in attendance already have become heavily involved in health care reforms proposed by President Obama, and there’s a chance that decision-makers will tip their hands on what’s to come.

Hamburg’s discussion on Wednesday is preceded by a panel about how reform will change innovation in health care. Additional talks cover health information technology, which received broad funding by the Obama administration, and the impact of the drug approval process for cancer.

Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove has campaigned nationally for including personal accountability in the health-care debate, and has been critical of a shift he sees from health reform to insurance reform. But Cosgrove is slated for only a 5-minute welcoming speech to kick off the event.

The past month also has put an exclamation point on the issues of drug mergers, questions about research and development, and the realignment of pharmaceutical companies and units by companies from Abbott to Procter & Gamble. A panel on approaches for pharmaceutical drug innovation includes Celgene Chief Executive Sol Barer and Schering-Plough’s leader Fred Hassan, among others.

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• Fred Hassan, Pharma Fixture and Now, Health Blogger (blogs.wsj.com)