Academia’s Role In Healthcare Innovation | John Langell | University of Utah

Is the healthcare industry really taking full advantage of all academia has to offer? Is academia really positioning itself appropriately to help drive healthcare innovation? For people like Dr. John Langell, Executive Director of the Center for Medical Innovation at the University of Utah and Chief of General Surgery at the George E. Wahlen VA Medical Center, the implied answer to those questions is “no.” Which is cool, because it gives them a lot of room to work from. The logical conclusion to answering “no” to the above questions is that it could be time to rethink the academic model of healthcare innovation. Maybe the old system of taking a faculty discovery, applying for a patent and then adding it to a tech transfer portfolio for potential licensing and commercialization isn’t enough. Langell isn’t just in the middle of this discussion, he’s trying to lead it. At the University of Utah Medical Innovation Program, the goal isn’t just to protect interesting ideas (i.e. rack up the patent count). It’s to fill real gaps in science, medicine and healthcare with real products. In other words, something that a good business will do but that academia hasn’t always had a reputation for.