- The University of Michigan Medical Innovation Center's
mission is fundamentally to move discovery,
medical discovery from this campus,
move it into the real world
so that it will change people's lives,
so it will improve health.
The resources we have at this university
and the amazing depth of the discovery
that goes on can be leveraged.
And when you look at the success stories
that have come from here,
they usually come with an engineer
got together with a doctor.
Or a scientist got together with an engineer.
It's usually taken that combination
to really make something exciting happen,
to take basic discovery and transform it
into an innovation that ultimately impacts people's lives.
We can do that in a number of ways.
We are doing it through an educational program
where we have brought a group
of post graduates together from different disciplines,
engineers, scientists, medical people,
business people, and given them a basic education
around the art and science of innovation
and given them access to the resources
of this campus so that they can identify
needs and opportunities in healthcare
and then leverage the resources here
to come up with something novel
that can really change and improve health.
- It's both interesting and challenging
working with people from really different backgrounds.
- We've spent countless hours with each other
and that passion of making some great thing in the end,
some great device in the end
is really what helps us all work together
and get along together really well.
- No doubt this experience,
this one year in this fellowship
is going to resonate throughout the rest
of my career.
- Its been amazing in this first year,
our first year, our first year of fellowship,
to see five people who came to us,
two engineers, a person with an MBA,
a PhD in neuroscience, and an MD
general surgery resident,
and came in with these very different backgrounds,
very different ideas about where they're headed
and just see how through this educational process
and their clinical experiences they've had
and now as they're into,
after they've identified needs
and opportunities in healthcare
they're now starting to actually solve those problems,
to see their lives transform
just is so energizing.
What's been really fascinating in this process
is that when you bring an engineer in
or somebody who has new eyes,
an MBA into the clinical environment,
they like, first thing they say,
why do you do that?
- The one that I really remember the most
is a 4-year-old, 4-month-old baby,
congenital heart defect,
and when they opened her up
her heart was about this big.
And after its been on the bypass machine
it still wanted to live and started pumping,
and that really got me
and said this is the reason why I'm here
'cause I wanna help.
- We actually only have a few paid employees right now
of the center.
The rest has been people that have volunteered their time.
They wanna participate because it's
not only fun but they know they're making a difference.
We recently had what we call an ideation session
where we bring in a diverse group
of people to help our fellows to solve a problem.
And we had nurses, and we even had
high school students and others.
And you know after that, to listen to them,
how charged they were to have participated in that.
You know one of the nurses told me
that she won't look at her,
she will look at her job differently from now on
because she never really thought
of wow I can actually contribute
to solving a problem like this.
You know we get so used to being in our
kind of daily rut that we don't realize
that we can make a difference and change things.
We also are working with inventors on the campus,
so looting to where there is discovery
and seeing if we can't help those inventors
to move those ideas forward
and make them commercial realities
where they can impact health.
- The University of Michigan is a tremendous
resource here in the greater Ann Arbor region,
and a resource to the state of Michigan.
The Medical Innovation Center
serves as a primary tool
to assist with development of commercial
innovations that are coming through
the medical school and then medical center.
It's great to see clinicians interested
in commercializing their innovations.
And I think this resource makes that possible.
Ann Arbor Spark serves as a tool
to help the innovators launch their ideas.
And having a resource like the Medical Innovation Center
really helps us in that process,
gives us access to the right talent,
it gives us access to their ideas.
It helps move their ideas down
the commercialization value chain.
- You know one of the projects that we've
engaged with a group of engineering students on
is the problem of bed sores, pressure sores.
It's a major health problem
and needs to have some tremendous
disability and scaring
and prolonged hospitalizations
and increased hospital costs
and the like.
So you know we've put together a team
based on the really detailed science
of one of our engineers, Sridhar Kota,
with regards to something called compliant
mechanisms,
with structures that have unique flexible properties.
And we're using that
and the engineering team
is designing a new type of hospital bed.
So where we're not there yet,
we have hurdles to get over,
and of course you always need funds
to fund development of a prototype
or to make the next step.
But our initial work is really exciting,
that has given us some hope
that we really could potentially create
a low cost new type of hospital bed,
which really hasn't been changed
in 50 years probably or longer.
Right now in the state of Michigan
we are in a tough economy.
We have an automobile industry that's fading,
and a lot of people are looking for
what's gonna be our future.
And for sure people are looking to healthcare
and to academic institutions,
universities because of the amount
of discovery that goes on.
So we, we in many ways are excited about this current time.
We see it as a tremendous opportunity
to be part of the change that's gonna come to this region,
and I am totally excited about it.