CU Innovations Brings Sciences from Inception to Implementation



Muller and Kennedy recording zoom

CU Innovations brings together some of the greatest minds of several academic fields at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and beyond to work across disciplines to benefit health and wellness in the larger communities. In today’s episode of the President’s Innovation Podcast, a CU on the Air series, we talk with Kimberly Muller, executive director of CU Innovations about the remarkable breakthroughs that are already benefiting society, and the great work to come.

  • CU Innovations was started five years ago by Muller and Steve VanNurden to fulfill Chancellor Don Elliman’s vision for how would you redesign define innovation at an academic medical center.
  • CU Innovations looks to create or partner with companies to redefine care delivery, redefine how we receive care to improve outcomes for physicians, patients and to lower the overall cost of care.
  • How this science benefited COVID research.
  • With hospital partners, Children’s Hospital Colorado, and the UCHealth system, CU Innovations has established a living clinical laboratory for testing and validating the best health care technologies wherever they may exist throughout the country.
  • Over the past four years, the department has had over 600 companies from around the United States come to Colorado to partner with it to take technologies and develop them at the point of care.
  • CU’s role in the technology utilized in GSK (Glaxo SmithKline) is multi-billion dollar Shingrix vaccine.
  • To help startups, CU Innovations has created a fund that can invest in these companies and clinical tests that are needed to validate the viable, leading-edge ideas.
  • The Health Care Innovation Fund is the first venture fund in the University of Colorado history. It was able to raise $50 million in less than six months.
  • RxRevu is helping to figure out how to get the right drug to the right patient at the right time at a cost that they afford.
  • Outside advisers include serial entrepreneur Stan Lapidus, who helps with business models and projected outcomes throughout the inception-implementation of new research.
  • Shi-Long Lu and Lapidus developed a new diagnostic for head and neck cancer. They started a company together and that technology was saliva-based diagnostics for head and neck cancer.
  • CU innovations is looking to expand what it does around novel therapeutics, using a data-driven approach to innovation, what is a unique data infrastructure at the Anschutz medical campus.

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