Cleveland Clinic Innovations (CCI) http://innovations.clevelandclinic.org) is the commercialization arm of the Cleveland Clinic and helps companies navigate the patenting and commercialization process. CCI tries to turns inventions into medical products that will benefit patients and create new business opportunities for many companies.
In the last 14 years, 66 companies have been helped by the Cleveland Clinic where the technology was developed and received much need expertise on the commercialization process. Nearly three quarters of these companies have received more than $750 million in equity investment to date. CCI has transacted nearly 450 licenses with more than 2,200 patient applications resulting in 525 patents being issued.
One CCI spinoff company called NaviGate received the green light to move their novel mitral silent valve prosthesis and delivery system a step closer to the bedside. Invented by Jose Navia MD, a Surgeon in the Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at the Cleveland Clinic, the system is designed to provide a minimally invasive treatment option for patients suffering from mitral valve disease who are considered too high risk to undergo traditional open heart surgery.
Last April, NaviGate secured a bridge financing deal that will enable the company to evaluate the system in chronic animal studies. After the chronic animal testing in finished, NaviGate expects to begin human patient trials in Europe later this year and do U.S clinical studies within the next three to five years. For more information on the project, email fortunp@ccf.org.
In other innovative developments, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation’s Medical Device Solutions Laboratory, (http://mds.clevelandclinic.org) are working on developing new bone scaffold materials to improve the healing of bone defects. The research is being done to determine the effectiveness of the scaffold materials and the extent to which they promote revascularization in and around the bone defect.
Researchers in the laboratory have developed a bone marrow oxygen telemetry system to measure the amount of revascularization needed to measure the oxygen levels in each bone defect as the bone heals. This system monitors the oxygen tension in the marrow space of the femur over a period of one month and then transmits the data out daily allowing researchers to track the progress of home revascularization after damage.