Christopher Coburn (pictured), executive director of US-based Cleveland Clinic Innovations (CCI), will move to non-profit peer Partners HealthCare to be vice-president of research ventures and licensing (RVL).
RVL is the division that coordinates industrial relationships and intellectual property management across Partners HealthCare, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Partners HealthCare is integrated health system with a $1.4bn annual research budget founded by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital and affiliated with Harvard University.
At Cleveland Clinic, Coburn had founded its Innovations unit that now has a team of 70 to commercialise the institute’s $300m annual research budget through licensing and spin-offs. Since its inception in 2000, CCI’s 55 spin-offs have raised nearly $700m. He also pioneered CCI’s national Innovation Alliance, through which the clinic manages innovation for providers throughout the US.
Coburn is on the board of Autonomic Technologies, Explorys, I360 Medical, and BioEnterprise.
Prior to his arrival at CCI, Coburn was a vice president at Battelle Memorial Institute, a large non-profit research institute in Ohio. Coburn also served as Ohio’s first science and technology adviser to the Governor, advising on all matters of technology, science and related economic strategy.
Anne Klibanski, chief academic officer at Partners HealthCare, said: “Chris brings to Partners years of experience — on both the national and international stage — in the field of forging closer ties between industry and academic medicine.
“Under Chris’s leadership, Partners, will build on its tradition of supporting the brightest scientific minds at Massachusetts General, Brigham and Women’s and McLean Hospitals in a way that will help yield the medical inventions of tomorrow to help patients worldwide.”
Coburn, a member of the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist 100, added: “With an increasing proportion of medical innovation expected to come from academia, it is exciting to be part of one of the nation’s largest academic research centres.”
Last year, CCI was recognized as one of the top four healthcare corporate venturing organizations.