November 25, 2012
On November 15th in anticipation of the planned merger of Rutgers University and the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey , the Rutgers Office of Technology Commercialization and UMDNJ hosted on the Rutgers campus a medical device summit entitled “Collaborative Innovation, The Next Generation of Medical Devices”. The summmit’s goal was to advance emerging healthcare technologies by connecting University researchers with corporate executives, business development professionals, investors, service providers and other members of the medical device innovation community.
The agenda included panelists, research presentations, luncheon networking and speakers including keynote speaker Harlan F. Weisman, M.D., former Chief Science and Technology Officer of Medical Devices and Diagnostics at Johnson & Johnson. Dr. Weisman’s presentation entitled ”Two Megatrends driving change in the Healthcare Industry” highlighted the key factors increasing the demand for patient centered value based healthcare that is occurring simultaneously with an explosive growth in scientific knowledge & new medical technologies.
Dr. Harlan attributed increasing demand for healthcare to a variety of factors: an aging population, many remaining areas of medical needs that are still unmet, numerous diseases affecting broad segments of population, the focus on early treatment and prevention of disease in new market segmentations, and a rising GDP and urbanization in developing markets. In parallel, the explosive growth in new medical technologies has resulted in an increasingly competitive environment for new innovation that has raised the threshold for new innovation, spurred intense global competition, resulted in more and more patent challenges, placed pressure on pricing, and has led to evolving regulatory requirements and longer development times.
As noted by Dr. Harlan the US has a unique role by having the largest medical device industry, as well as being the leader in medical device innovation. Faced with the demands and challenges associated with these two megatrends, Dr. Harlan advocates continued innovation, but innovation that is done more often via “collaboration across boundaries between and among universities, payers, patients, clinicians, within companies and between companies.”
The summit’s large turnout of over 300 attendees that included prominent industry participants and a broad representation of the medical device industry gave focus to the the important role of the medical device industry in the New Jersey economy. This was detailed by John Ehret, Labor Market Analyst at the NJ Department of Labor and Workforce Development (LWD) who delivered an overview of the New Jersey medical device industry and the medical device clusters of north, central and south New Jersey. He noted that the Bio/Pharmaceutical/Life Science clusters in New Jersey (that includes the medical device industry) represents 3.9% of state employment, but account for a much a greater 8.1% of wages. Further underscoring the importance of the medical device industry as a high salary job creator for New Jersey, medical device employee salaries are 66.2% higher than the average New Jersey wage while generating on average 4.5 additional jobs for each medical device technology job.
With such a large turnout Marcus Crews, New Ventures Program Coordinator and Lori Dars Marketing Manager at the Office of Technology Commercialization both felt that the summit had also achieved another key goal of giving medical device entrepreneurs proximity to resources and important industry participants-furthering the cross boundary collaboration advocated by Dr. Weisman. The summit also gave an opportunity for the Rutgers Technology Office to promote REMP, The Rutgers Entrepreneurs Mentoring Program which they administer. REMP is intended to address the needs of medical device entrepreneurs in a variety of ways, from one-on-one mentoring programs to special seminars and workshops designed to help start-up companies learn all that they need to know to be successful. The summit provided an interface with the broad medical device industry in New Jersey enabling the Technology Office to gain insight from attendees and summit participants on ways to advance the mission of its mentoring program.
