New center to accelerate development of patient care
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| Omar Lattouf, MD, PhD, is a cardiothoracic surgeon at Emory University and the newly appointed director of the Emory Center for Device Innovation. |
The Woodruff Health Sciences Center at Emory University (Atlanta) is implementing the knowledge it has accumulated over 5 decades to establish the Emory Center for Device Innovation (CDI). The CDI will prepare projects for outside investment, product development, and commercialization. Additionally, the CDI will help Emory faculty members protect their ideas as patentable intellectual property.
"The key mission of the center is to streamline the process at Emory so that scientific discoveries can lead to therapeutic products that benefit patients," said Omar Lattouf, MD, PhD, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Emory and the newly appointed director of the CDI. "Emory is rich with innovators, outstanding scientists, and highly capable clinicians who are dedicated to providing the best patient care and academic productivity. It is the right place for developing patient-focused innovations and inventions as well as encouraging investment in cutting-edge technologies that will bring less-invasive procedures, shorter hospital stays, and speedier recovery."
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| Emory, which offers the only heart program in Georgia, was involved in the development of stent technology. Shown here is the site of the first stent implant in the United States, which was in 1987. |
Michael M.E. Johns, MD, is executive VP for health affairs at Emory University, CEO of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center, and chairman of the board for Emory Healthcare. Johns directs the Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center, which supports and funds the CDI. "Encouraging innovations, protecting ideas, proving their worth, and then taking them to the industry, investors, and collaborators to further advance new discoveries is the key to medical progress," Johns said. "It's another way in which we are, as an institution, working to make people healthy everywhere."
Lattouf added, "Proving the concepts behind the inventions can be costly and time consuming. But proof is necessary to attract the investment dollars needed to take inventions to market and make them available for patients and doctors everywhere."
In close collaboration with both Emory as well as the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta), the CDI will initially focus on one of Emory's strengths—cardiac and vascular devices and therapeutics—and expand into other clinical specialties and strategic scientific areas across the various disciplines of the university.
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