“A lot of solutions to your problems exist in somebody else’s operating room, or somebody else’s cath lab, but you never actually go there.”
These were the words of Alan B. Lumsden, MD, of the Houston Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, delivering the keynote talk at yesterday’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Vascular Surgery session, during which speakers sought to chart a course through the complex landscape that budding innovators must navigate to take potentially practice-changing ideas from the drawing board into the operating room.
“Get out of your space,” was among the abiding message from Lumsden’s presentation, where he compelled vascular surgeon innovators to bring ideas, skills and expertise from other fields—borrowing from “the other guy’s toolkit”—in order to enrich their own specialty, whether these be from other areas of medicine or further afield. Lumsden drew upon examples from as far and wide as the plastic surgery specialty to the energy and aerospace sectors to illustrate his point that vascular surgery innovators must spread their net widely to draw on the best ideas to serve their practice.
However, speakers in the session were in agreement that translating ideas from bench to bedside is not without its risks and significant hurdles. “You are surgeons primarily. You can give up your practice and roll the dice, that is financially shaky,” Lumsden said. “You are going to have to make a decision about why you want to get involved in this space. One of the motivating factors is that you as a physician are not scalable, you treat one patient at a time. But, if you develop something you are really doing population health, you can affect hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people.”
The session laid bare the tortuous pathway facing surgeon innovators once they have chosen to take this step, with financing and intellectual property among the pain points. Presentations by Bryan W. Tillman, MD, and David Minion, MD, underscored the importance of securing intellectual property rights to protect promising ideas, but highlighted some of the challenges inherent in establishing a patent for new innovations. Stephen Von Rump, MS, delivered lessons on what financiers are looking for when they consider which start-ups to support.
The session also outlined some of the support and resources available to ease this path. To this end Jonathan Bath, MD, outlined details of ongoing work by the SVS to support innovations in the field, with the recent establishment of an Innovation Task Force with a mission to nurture new device and procedural concepts.
“Surgeon innovators have a rich history. This is why the SVS has put an emphasis on trying to provide some resources and an actual formalized structure to help the innovators get, eventually, to a product,” said Bath. To date there has been a shortage of guidance, resources and education to support this agenda, he noted, adding that the Task Force would seek to fill this gap.
The focus of the Task Force’s actions will be around three pillars, Bath detailed, notably education, networking, and resources, all geared to help “fertilize” the innovation process.
One of the support routes currently open to academic innovators is via biomedical accelerator programs which can provide funding, mentorship, and resources to early-stage companies and research projects. Jaya Ghosh, PhD, program director of the University of Missouri (MU) Coulter Biomedical Accelerator gave an overview of how programs such as these select which projects are suitable for support, and outlined a number of areas in which they are able to help bring new concepts to commercial reality, including regulatory strategy, reimbursement, manufacturing and scalability. “It truly takes a village to turn an idea into a real-world product, and these programs offer the training, funding and project management needed to de-risk early-stage innovations and help bring visionary ideas to life,” said Ghosh.
