Chris Coburn is the captain of Cleveland Clinic Innovations, the corporate venturing arm of the Cleveland Clinic.
The 53-year-old fitness enthusiast and his crew have an important job: nurturing inventions that emerge from several thousand scientists and doctors at the nation’s top heart hospital, and guiding them through a years-long process to commercial viability, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Coburn, the son of a thoracic surgeon, grew up eating politics and policy. He cut his commercialization teeth at Battelle, building the research institute’s Cleveland-based commercialization unit to 60 people. He has been executive director of what then was known as CCF (Cleveland Clinic Foundation) Innovations since 2000.
Known simply as Cleveland Clinic Innovations (CCI), the group of more than 35 people recently started their second decade with a first-of-its-kind venture ranking, a brand-new incubator building and a growing portfolio of spin-out companies.
Perhaps most impressive, those companies — 33 in all — have attracted more than $340 million in follow-on funding from other investors. About two weeks ago, Arterial Remodeling Technologies, a French company whose technology was developed in part by the Cleveland Clinic, said it raised $8.5 million in venture capital funding to further develop its biodegradable stents.
Among CCI’s other spinouts: AxioMed Spine Corp. in Garfield Heights, Ohio, is developing next-generation spinal disc replacements. Clear Catheter Systems in Bend, Oregon, and Cleveland recently received European approval to sell its active catheter-clearance system PleuraFlow. Tolera Therapeutics Inc. in Kalamazoo, Michigan, last month raised more than $4 million to continue developing a drug that fights organ rejection in transplant patients.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The innovations group has had two exits in its first decade. One — Cleveland BioLabs (NASDAQ: CBLI) — happened through a tiny ($14 million) initial public offering in 2006. Another company, ReVasc, was sold in 2007 to Micrus Endovascular Corp. (NASDAQ: MEND) in San Jose, California, for $1 million, with the potential of $5 million more in future milestone payments.
In addition to spinoffs, Coburn has led his group to licensing revenues of $8 million a year, the Plain Dealer reported. And Coburn is credited with starting the Clinic’s Medical Innovation Summits. The eighth summit — this one on obesity, diabetes and the metabolic crisis — will be held next month.
Coburn told the Plain Dealer about his finest hour — to date — at the helm of Cleveland Clinic Innovations. In 2006, Coburn et. al. set their sights on a $60 million grant from the Ohio Third Frontier to establish the program’s only “mega-center of innovation.” Boarding a bus home from Columbus after a strong presentation to a vetting panel from the National Academies of Science, the group broke out the beer and the single-malt scotch.
Someone read the St. Crispin’s Day speech from William Shakespeare’s play Henry V. Near its end, the speech reads: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.”
“Some of the people in my office would tell you that that moment, that day was the greatest day of their time at Cleveland Clinic,” Coburn told the newspaper.
By the way, the group got their Third Frontier Grant. And Coburn and his staff moved into the resulting technology incubator — the $19-million, 50,000-square-foot Global Cardiovascular Innovation Center on the southern edge of the Clinics main campus — in April.
