Hospitals, Startups

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia focusing on entrepreneurship

Innovation is becoming as important as research to academic medical centers all over the country, which is why the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia brought in Patrick K. FitzGerald to the newly created position of vice president for entrepreneurship and innovation last month.

Innovation is becoming as important as research to academic medical centers all over the country.

“We want people to see this office as a pit stop” for advice, on a parallel track with the institution’s research facilities, said Patrick K. FitzGerald, who has held the newly created position of vice president for entrepreneurship and innovation at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for less than a month. Outgoing CHOP CEO Dr. Stephen Altschuler, who is retiring at the end of June, brought FitzGerald in as a consultant about a year ago before adding the full-time job this year.

In an interview with MedCity News, FitzGerald said he is focused on: establishing an entrepreneurial culture at CHOP; building a roadmap to help would-be entrepreneurs develop and market their ideas; and handle external relations for innovators and their products.

His office is intended to be a recruiting brand as well as a tool to retain talent, he said.

FitzGerald expects that CHOP will have 1-2 “transformative” projects a year worthy of commercialization, though profit is not the primary motive. The question FitzGerald wants answered is: “Will there be opportunities to put it into practice within CHOP?”

The answer to that question was a definitive “yes” in the case of Spark Therapeutics, a gene therapy company that CHOP spun out 2013. Spark Therapeutics went public in January. “I think Spark Therapeutics was only the beginning,” he said.

“Maybe they won’t be IPOs like Spark, but they will be of that ilk,” FitzGerald said of the projects he wants to commercialize.

Don’t’ expect anything on that scale in the immediate future from this new office, though. “Right now, we are really focused on cataloging,” building a list of assets and resources the hospital possesses, said FitzGerald, who teaches undergraduate and MBA-level entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

CHOP is involved in the Philadelphia Pediatric Medical Device Consortium, a local organization that helps entrepreneurs in this field develop and commercialize their ideas. “We see PPDC as a resource that we can direct them to,” FitzGerald said.

Part of external relations is helping startups find investors, though that usually happens when venture capitalists approach the institution. “It’s unlikely that we will be out there searching on our own” for investments, FitzGerald said. CHOP did put money into Velano Vascular, maker of a new type of blood-drawing technology, but that company had a longstanding relationship with Altschuler, a Velano spokesperson said.

CHOP’s name isn’t necessarily slapped onto companies it incubates. “We expect brands to speak for themselves,” FitzGerald said.

Shares0
Shares0