Cedars-Sinai Technology Ventures: Turning Ideas Into Innovations

Every day, scientists across Cedars-Sinai’s vast research and clinical enterprise are focused on developing medical discoveries and breakthroughs to improve health outcomes.

Cedars-Sinai Technology Ventures brings these medical innovations to the global marketplace by directing the commercial development of research through long-term relationships with industry partners and investors—all with the goal of advancing healthcare solutions and improving the health and wellbeing of patients.

From opportunities across biological technology, medical technology and digital health solutions focused on precision medicine, the human microbiome and cell therapy, the multidisciplinary Technology Ventures team collaborates with clinicians across the health system and worldwide to ensure that the technologies will meet the medical needs of patients facing various diseases and conditions.

Technology Ventures is led by James D. Laur, JD, chief intellectual property officer at Cedars-Sinai. The team manages a portfolio of more than 500 technologies in various stages of development, oversees more than 1,100 patents, and has generated more than $1 billion in technology transfer revenue over the past five years.

The Technology Ventures enterprise includes the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator, which engages with early-stage health-tech startups. Nirdesh K. Gupta, PhD, managing director of Technology Ventures and managing director of the Accelerator, is at the helm of leading the growth and development of early-stage technologies and companies focused on improving healthcare.

Through Cedars-Sinai Technology Ventures and the complementary Health Ventures fund, Cedars-Sinai invests in new technologies and early-stage companies whose research and technologies hold the potential to transform the delivery of healthcare in more efficient and cost-effective ways.

Laur and Gupta sat down with the Cedars-Sinai Newsroom to discuss how they are working to transform healthcare quality, efficiency, and care delivery by helping entrepreneurs bring their innovative technology products to market.

What is the mission of Technology Ventures?

Laur: Technology Ventures enables healthcare technologies and startup companies that enhance and amplify Cedars-Sinai’s mission of delivering quality healthcare. We want to be at the forefront of driving innovations in the healthcare industry and have a positive voice as a thought leader and partner for the various solutions.

Gupta: As a hospital, we have the unique advantage of being closest to the patients, allowing us to understand the complex challenges of healthcare in an intimate way. We see opportunity for innovation and better solutions with every patient treated within our health system. As these inventions are commercialized, profits are reinvested into Cedars-Sinai, supporting its ongoing research programs and clinical infrastructure.

Tell us more about the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator.

Gupta: The Cedars-Sinai Accelerator supports the growth and development of early-stage companies focused on improving healthcare and healthcare delivery. We help entrepreneurs by providing mentorship, guidance and support to help them develop and scale innovative companies. The goal is to fast-track the development of the next generation of ideas that will transform patient care at Cedars-Sinai and beyond.

How do medical professionals work with you?

Laur: We encourage investigators to view us as partners in taking their dreams and turning them into reality. We ask them to bring us any idea, regardless of how rough or ready it may be. We then vet the idea to confirm a viable path to protect it. After that, we work with investigators to test the feasibility of the idea. Our support extends through the intellectual property protection process, preclinical and clinical development phases, regulatory submissions and approvals, product pilots, commercialization through licensing or startups, and all the way through global partnerships.

The idea is to identify all innovations and inventions from within our medical center and support the path to commercialize them domestically and globally.

How do companies and organizations partner with you?

Gupta: Working with outside companies and organizations to develop new healthcare advances is complementary to our ongoing work within Cedars-Sinai. We have built a robust pipeline to promote innovation across channels—including those outside of our health system—and have multiple avenues where internal innovation meets external innovation. Receiving buy-in from all relevant stakeholders within our internal and external systems allows us to approach each innovative idea with a holistic viewpoint.  

Does this work extend beyond the United States?

Gupta: We are actively working toward the creation of an international alliance of world-renowned institutes to foster a multilateral exchange of ideas and solutions. For example, we have built a strong network of partners in Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

These partnerships allow us to bring best-in-class, external innovations to Cedars-Sinai, while also providing us with access to international markets and international healthcare solutions.

Tell us about a recent success.

Laur: A recent success is also our largest success story and the most gratifying. Prometheus Biosciences was a spinoff company established in 2016 to continue the development of a new therapeutic for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) developed by a team of clinician-scientists at Cedars-Sinai. In addition to working with the investigators at Cedars-Sinai to de-risk and focus the intellectual property around the invention, over time, based on our conviction that the technology had promise to address an unmet patient need, we invested $40 million into the company even when outside investors were reluctant to take the risk. We collaborated with a team of medical experts and seasoned entrepreneurs who shared our vision for the company as a vehicle to bring the new IBD therapeutic to the market.

It took us seven years of perseverance through the highs and the lows, but our commitment to developing a better treatment for IBD patients kept us focused. Prometheus Biosciences was sold to Merck in June of 2023 for nearly $11 billion, a portion of which came back to Cedars-Sinai—a truly amazing example of how the Technology Ventures group carried out Cedars-Sinai’s mission of bringing research from the lab to the real world.

Gupta: It was the first such success at this scale seen in technology transfer offices around the world and validated our unique approach to bring new inventions to the market. We endeavor to continue working on such challenging, yet high-impact projects to improve patient outcomes. With more than 500 technologies in our portfolio, we have several more successes waiting in the pipeline.

Read more from the Cedars-Sinai Blog: A Technology Transfer Office Success