At Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai, developing research discoveries into commercially viable technologies is one way the health system generates financial resources to support its research and community benefit programs. But the system has learned that partnering too early can limit its financial return on research discoveries.
Jim Laur, senior vice president of intellectual property and health ventures, said Cedars-Sinai has seen promising inventions and therapeutics succeed after leaving its laboratories without fully benefiting from their eventual commercial value.
“We’ve had some really amazing inventions and new therapeutics come out of Cedars-Sinai, and we’ve seen success with their development in the real world,” Mr. Laur said on the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.” “We’re very proud of our part in developing them at the beginning, but we never enjoyed the true upside of those breakthroughs.”
That experience has shaped the system’s approach to commercialization, with Cedars-Sinai working to advance certain discoveries further internally before licensing them or spinning them off, Mr. Laur said.
“Before you take a really exciting technology, license it out and let someone else run with it, ask yourself what you can do in the medical center’s research labs to move it as far as it can go,” Mr. Laur said.
He said that work can include additional research, early studies and preparation for potential FDA approval, with the goal of making a discovery more commercially valuable before bringing in an outside partner.
One example is Prometheus Biosciences, a company that grew out of Cedars-Sinai research into inflammatory bowel disease and was acquired by Merck for $10.8 billion in 2023. Cedars-Sinai received approximately $899 million from the transaction, according to its 2024 report to the community.
Mr. Laur said the work began with researchers who had spent years studying why patients with inflammatory bowel disease responded differently to the same treatments. Rather than licensing their discoveries at an early stage, Cedars-Sinai continued working with its clinicians to develop the underlying research before spinning off the company.
That experience also shaped how Cedars-Sinai thinks about working with industry partners, which have traditionally taken on much of the work involved in developing early discoveries from academic institutions, Mr. Laur said.
“We not only proved to ourselves, but proved to industry, that we make a really great partner, because we can do a lot of sophisticated things that aren’t just academic or hypothetical but have true commercial development impact,” he said. “That allows us to have very different conversations with industry now.”
Cedars-Sinai supports its commercialization work through Technology Ventures, which helps move discoveries from the system’s laboratories toward commercial development. Mr. Laur also oversees the Accelerator+ program, which connects outside companies with clinicians and administrators to address operational and clinical challenges, and investment activities involving more commercially developed companies through Cedars-Sinai Ventures.
Mr. Laur said having these activities within one group allows Cedars-Sinai to work with technologies at different stages of development, from early discoveries to implementation.
“We touch the earliest, scariest cocktail napkin drawings and the discovery in a test tube, all the way through scaling and implementing,” Mr. Laur said. “At other institutions, those are segmented, and the handoffs are rougher or not as connected.”
When considering technologies developed outside Cedars-Sinai, Mr. Laur said his team starts by identifying problems that clinicians and administrators want to solve and determining whether the organization is ready to pursue a potential solution.
“If they purchased and installed a nurse call system two years ago and I find a wonderful new AI solution for all things nurse call, nobody’s going to want to spend time on it, because we’re not ready,” he said.
For Cedars-Sinai, the financial value of commercialization extends beyond the individual technologies or companies involved. As a nonprofit organization, the system reinvests returns from its commercial activities into research, community service and other work supporting its mission, Mr. Laur said.
Mr. Laur said the financial returns from Cedars-Sinai’s commercial activities are reinvested in the nonprofit organization to support research, community service and community benefit programs. He encouraged other academic medical centers to prioritize innovation despite the costs and challenges involved in developing and implementing new technologies.
“What’s easy is not doing anything differently. Doing things the same way is much less expensive,” Mr. Laur said. “Change is not only hard, it’s expensive. But if we don’t do it, who else is going to?”
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