Joseph Loscalzo, MD, PhD

Partners HealthCare and its founding hospitals, BWH and Massachusetts General Hospital, will form the Boston-Biomedical Innovation Center with a $12 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The seven-year grant will help accelerate the process by which scientific discoveries are translated into commercially viable products that can improve patient care and advance public health. The grant will also enable Harvard Medical School to educate researchers throughout the region on best practices in the field of medical commercialization. Joseph Loscalzo, MD, PhD, chairman of the BWH Department of Medicine and physician-in-chief at BWH, will be the corresponding principal investigator for this project.

These grants are intended to fund the creation of NIH Centers for Accelerated Innovations (NCAIs), funded by the NIH’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. The initial NCAIs will target technologies to improve the diagnosis, treatment, management and prevention of heart, lung, blood, and sleep disorders and diseases. Cleveland Clinic and the University of California were the only other centers in the nation to receive grant funding.

NCAIs will provide an integrated, systematic and comprehensive approach to navigating the translation of early-stage biomedical innovations from the research laboratory to commercial development and successful deployment to patients. Each center will be a consortium of academic, government, non-profit and private-sector organizations that will provide funding for feasibility studies; regulatory, legal and business development expertise; and entrepreneurial training and mentorship.