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Wake Forest Health Expands Commercialization Program

Eric Tomlinson (Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center)

Eric Tomlinson (Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center)

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina started a new division to encourage development of new products and services from its research. Wake Forest Innovations, as the division is called, is expected to generate new revenue streams for the medical center by growing and managing new business partnerships.

Wake Forest Innovations has a Product Innovation and Commercialization Services unit to help create new technologies based on the medical center’s research findings, and commercialize those technologies licensing to existing and start-up companies. The product innovation group plans to introduce scientist-entrepreneurs to faculty research groups to advise medical center researchers on business development issues such as intellectual property protection, regulatory practices, business case modeling, competitive position, and path to market.

The commercialization staff in this unit will license technologies and products, and help start-up companies through their capital formation and early operations. The unit will manage two funds to help new companies get off the ground: Spark Grants to help develop new product ideas and a Value Inflection Fund to help finance new life sciences companies through the early preclinical and proof-of-concept stage.

A separate Scientific Business Services unit in Wake Forest Innovations will market the medical center’s research assets to external partners. That group now manages the medical center’s Preclinical Surgical Services, a contract research organization, and Center for Applied Learning, an in-service professional training center. This unit will add to its offerings bioinformatics, medical device testing, nanomedicine, and genetic tests.

Wake Forest Innovations is led by Eric Tomlinson, Wake Forest medical center’s Chief Innovation Officer (pictured at top), as well as president of Piedmont Triad Research Park in Winston Salem where Wake Forest Innovations is located. Piedmont Triad Research Park is designed as a place where scientists can interact with science-oriented businesses and organizations, generating new ideas and synergies from their proximity.

The park currently houses Wake Forest University’s School of Medicine’s Department of Physiology and Pharmacology and Winston-Salem State University’s Biomedical Research Infrastructure Center, as well as 27 companies, agencies, and organizations. New companies generated by Wake Forest Innovations are expected in incubate in Piedmont Triad Research Park.

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