Realize Penn Medicine's Potential for Innovation

There are three major tenets that will allow Penn Medicine to realize our potential for innovation.

Improve technology transfer and commercialization

Translational research, a priority at Penn Medicine, offers an ideal opportunity for forming more effective partnerships with the private sector, which increasingly turns to academia for research and development alliances. While remaining true to our legacy as an academic medical center, we will also develop new relationships with industry that promote the translation of our discoveries into effective therapies, devices, and products that improve the human condition.

At the direction of President Gutmann, the University is launching a new model for technology transfer at Penn and implementing specific initiatives to foster a culture that encourages innovation and commercialization of research discoveries. Many of the themes emerging from this new organization are aligned with, and emanate from, the thoughtful discourse by the Penn Medicine faculty during this planning process. The University will announce the new model later in the spring of 2013.

• Foster clinical trials. Aggressively increase clinical trials underway at Penn Medicine through a streamlined organizational structure, a dedicated Phase 1 Unit in the Perelman Center, and continued improvements in IT support.
• Establish a Penn Venture fund to support early stage research. Working within guidelines to be established by the University, a venture fund will be established, managed by independent third-party experts and funded by philanthropy.
• Provide "one stop shopping" to faculty for discoveries and start-up companies. Planned improvements include licensing officers and tech transfer support staff embedded within the PSOM, re-training and recruitment of service oriented staff, and growth of expertise in medical device and software licensing and development.

Create a new Institute for Biomedical Informatics

We will unify current programs and assets under the leadership of a new Institute for Biomedical informatics. We will provide our faculty with high-performance computing capacity and establish a research data store that will be known as "PennOmics – the Engine behind Precision Medicine." In addition to the recruitment of the Institute Director and new faculty with expertise in this domain, a new master's program in biomedical informatics and computational biology will allow us to develop—from within—informaticians for the future.

Develop a Penn Bio-bank focused on disease-based initiatives

We will build a powerful capability for bio-sampling and bio-banking and support it with an enhanced effort for clinical phenotyping. This will culminate in an enterprise-wide bio-banking program with comprehensive patient samples and longitudinal patient phenotypes.