When four of Georgia’s leading health care and research centers wanted to join forces to establish a medical device creation and marketing consortium, lawyer Phillip H. Street was there to help them give birth to their brainchild.
The result is the Global Center for Medical Innovation, which unites Georgia Tech, St. Joseph’s Translational Research Institute, Piedmont Healthcare and the Georgia Research Alliance via contracts and operational guidelines that Street, a partner with Kilpatrick Stockton, drafted and is still developing.
“The goal of the entity is to leverage the research done both locally and nationally,” said Street. “It will work as a conduit to help … [get] research to viable commercial outlets. The legal framework … deals with intellectual property issues, commercial licensing, corporate issues, tax issues.
“There’s a lot of legal work yet to be done.”
That’s not surprising given the Global Center’s focus on getting medical devices to market.
Wayne Hodges, the acting vice provost of Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute and one of the primary people behind the founding of the Global Center, said a central motivation for launching it was to move intellectual property out of the university setting and into an arena that allowed for more aggressive development, specifically of medical devices related to cardiology, orthopedics and pediatrics.
“Look at the hospitals—some of the leading clinicians in the country and the world are here in Atlanta. But some of these organizations did not have intellectual property development, so we sat down and started talking about that,” Hodges said. “How could we better support this? How could we speed up the process of commercializing these devices?”
His conclusion: “Infrastructure is important” in order to attract the attention of large companies and large investments.
According to Dr. Jay Yadav, chairman of the Piedmont Innovation Center and founder of medical device company CardioMEMS, the infrastructure that the Global Center proposes is rare, and doesn’t exist even in biotech epicenters such as Minneapolis and the San Francisco Bay area.
The new group, he said, will offer a prototyping center and an animal research facility.
“Right now, what happens is if you have a new device, you have to go all over the country to make parts of it,” he said. For animal research, he added, companies usually need to travel to the West Coast or North Carolina. “You can do it all here, now. It’s just very streamlined.”
The Global Center is financed by $400,000 in seed money—$100,000 from each of the four founding institutions. Yadav said millions more will be needed and acknowledged that this could be a challenge in the current economic environment.
Still, he added, the market is there. “The potential is very large. The medical device industry in the United States is almost a $100 billion industry.”
As for Street’s role in the ongoing development of the Global Center, Yadav jokingly adds, “It should generate plenty of legal work.”