Technology Commercialization at Nationwide Children’s Hospital

Scientific discovery is the basis for new technologies and products that improve the lives of children everywhere. Nationwide Children’s Hospital has a remarkable track record of moving discoveries into the marketplace. The hospital’s Office of Technology Commercialization facilitates the transfer of new technologies, research and innovations to outside partners to benefit patients, the local community and the general public.

“There is a real pipeline here,” says Matthew McFarland, RPh, PhD, vice president, Commercialization and Industry Relations at Nationwide Children’s. “We’re not only innovating clinical tools to help provide safer and better health care, we’re also developing therapeutics, diagnostic biomarkers, software that improves data analysis and models that help study disease.

“People might not intuitively think of a nonprofit hospital like Nationwide Children’s as a hotbed for technology commercialization,” he says. “They should. Just like universities, we make substantial investments in commercialization of new discoveries and create job-producing startup companies.”

To date, the Office of Technology Commercialization has supported the transfer of a wide variety of technology licenses, including virtual reality programs, surgical and clinical devices, and gene therapy products. Furthermore, they helped investigators file more than 300 patents in the last five years. In that same time, more than 40 patents were issued.

Startups from Nationwide Children's Hospital