Georgia’s biotech industry expects to soon grow healthier.
Four of Atlanta’s leading health care and research organizations will announce Tuesday the creation of a medical research “innovation center” to speed to market medical devices.
Georgia Tech, St. Joseph’s Translational Research Institute, Piedmont Healthcare and the Georgia Research Alliance will each put up $100,000 to launch the Global Center for Medical Innovation. The center will be housed at Technology Enterprise Park, alongside Georgia Tech.
Gov. Sonny Perdue will formally unveil the research and business incubator this afternoon at the huge — and hugely important to Georgia — 2009 BIO International Convention at the Georgia World Congress Center. The conference is expected to draw 15,000, beginning Tuesday.
Emory University also will share some news: the establishment of a “new drug discovery institute” to be located on campus. In addition, the school will form a partnership with Australia’s Queensland Institute of Medical Research to develop vaccines, said David Stephens, vice president of research in the Woodruff Health Sciences Center at Emory.
Research and hospital officials talked excitedly Monday of the “innovation center,” which will initially focus on bringing cardiologic, orthopedic and pediatric devices and technologies to the marketplace.
The not-for-profit business incubator, which they label the first in the Southeastern United States, is expected to attract investors and medical-device companies — and keep Georgia-based inventors from taking their business, jobs and profits elsewhere.
“This will move us to the application stage of development, beyond the laboratory and the invention stage,” Michael Cassidy, president of the Georgia Research Alliance, said Monday. “We’ll be developing the ideas and ability to really scale up capacity so that [the inventions] will be attractive to industry.”
The initial $400,000 investment will be used to establish the center’s business plan. Investors are expected to pony up “several million dollars” later this year, Cassidy said, to create a “prototyping center” where medical devices will be test-driven.
Dr. Jay Yadav, chairman of the Piedmont Healthcare Center for Medical Innovation, said the public-private research and development center will pair doctors — who invent 80 percent of all medical devices — with engineers.
Doctors “are on the front line of taking care of the patient,” said Yadav, a cardiologist and CEO of a medical device company. “They understand the key problems and solutions. What’s missing is the engineering help, however, to turn these ideas into devices.”
Georgia is not synonymous with biotechnology, the use of biology to create products for medicine, food and the environment. California, Massachusetts and North Carolina all count more biotech investment, companies and prestige.
Georgia’s industry consists of mainly smaller, early-stage companies that haven’t registered as many biotech breakthroughs as the competition. Venture capitalists, the main financial source for startups, don’t typically invest in Georgia either.
Yet biotech and ancillary businesses are among the state’s fastest-growing industries, with more than 60,000 jobs responsible for billions of payroll and tax dollars, according to the Georgia Department of Economic Development.
Yadav, citing Atlanta’s renowned universities, hospitals and airport, said the innovation center should stamp Georgia firmly on the world’s biotech consciousness. “There’s no reason companies from Europe and all over the world can’t come to utilize this setup,” he said.
Labels: Atlanta, biotech research center, Georgia, Georgia Tech, piedmont healthcare, st. joseephs translational research institute
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Brian Vanderhoff @ 12:00 PM
