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

Parents of children 3 to 17 years old can now access Cedars-Sinai healthcare providers for urgent issues, including cough, cold, flu or rash.

• Parents can choose on-demand visits 24/7 or a scheduled visit 7 a.m.-9 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m.-4 p.m. on weekends for their sick child.
• A child’s existing pediatrician is kept in the loop through the Cedars-Sinai electronic health record.

Spanish-speaking adults and parents of children 3 and older can now choose a Spanish-language app experience.

• Spanish-speaking healthcare providers are available for scheduled visits 7 a.m.-9 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m.-4 p.m. on weekends.
• Translators can support patients seeking on-demand care 24/7 if a Spanish-speaking provider is not available.
• Spanish-speaking adults can access primary care in their preferred language to manage chronic conditions, such as high blood pressure, anxiety, depression and obesity.

“Cedars-Sinai Connect has already helped thousands of new and existing patients easily access the high-quality care for which Cedars-Sinai is known, from home,” said Jill Martin, executive vice president of Cedars-Sinai Medical Network. “The platform is helping us extend that opportunity to even more people throughout California who are coming to Cedars-Sinai for convenient acute or chronic care. These patients also gain access to our broad network of specialists through referrals when appropriate.”

The new care options for children and Spanish speakers build on Cedars-Sinai Connect’s initial success. Since the platform launched in fall 2023, it has helped more than 8,000 patients from San Diego to Sacramento access Cedars-Sinai care through more than 10,500 virtual visits.

“Patients have come to rely on Cedars-Sinai Connect as a convenient way to access Cedars-Sinai expert care and a comprehensive primary care experience,” said Caroline Goldzweig, MD, chief medical officer of Cedars-Sinai Medical Network. “Our unique hybrid model not only offers high-quality virtual care, but it is fully integrated into a top-tier academic health system, making it easier to coordinate care and share a patient’s health records with all of their providers.” 

Cedars-Sinai Connect harnesses AI technology developed by K Health to reduce administrative burdens such as data entry, freeing doctors to focus more time on patient care. K Health helps patients manage their acute, chronic and preventive care needs through its platform that harnesses medical knowledge and real patient experiences.

“Cedars-Sinai Connect is one of the first integrated clinical care apps of its kind that is successfully using technology and care model innovation to address significant pain points—particularly access and quality—in healthcare in the U.S.,” said Ran Shaul, co-founder and chief product officer of K Health. “By combining K Health’s virtual care model with Cedars-Sinai’s high-quality clinical care, our partnership gives Cedars-Sinai greater digital capability while expanding access to expert care across California.”

Martin added that with pediatric care and Spanish-speaking doctors now available, “Cedars-Sinai Connect is furthering our collective goals of tying together in-person and virtual care, reducing wait times and addressing primary care needs for as many Californians as possible, helping Cedars-Sinai advance health equity.” 

Read more on the Cedars-Sinai Blog: Women’s Heart Health | The Virtues of a Virtual Second Opinion

Another is studying how artificial intelligence (AI) technology can help predict disease outcomes through X-rays, CT scans and MRI images.

A third group hopes to predict COVID-19 outbreaks using genomic data that machine learning algorithms understand.

This is a sampling of the eight projects that more than 170 undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral students, scientists, medical residents, faculty members and others working in scientific or medical institutions are participating in this spring through Cedars-Sinai’s National AI Campus. This project-based learning initiative is in its second year at Cedars-Sinai, and it brings together AI experts and people from various educational and professional levels to address challenging problems in science and medicine using AI and machine learning.

National AI Campus is part of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Research and Education, a component of the medical center’s Department of Computational Biomedicine. It was developed in 2018 by Xiuzhen Huang, PhD, research professor in Computational Biomedicine, when she was at Arkansas State University. When Huang joined Cedars-Sinai, she brought National AI Campus along. Today, National AI Campus is connected to a nationwide program with participants from diverse academic programs and institutions and also includes high school students.

“National AI Campus makes artificial intelligence accessible to a broad community by offering a collaborative, highly interactive training program in which everyone can learn from each other,” Huang said. “At Cedars-Sinai, because of our focus as a medical center and academic institution, we tailor our program around biomedically related projects. We offer medical imaging and genomic projects, as well as those focusing on business analytics and social sciences.”

National AI Campus is free of charge and open to anyone working at Cedars-Sinai or at other invited institutions—at any experience level, in any degree or area of specialty, and with or without previous programming, machine learning or high-performance computing experience.

“All you need is a willingness to learn the basics and an interest in exploring the leading edge of AI and machine learning in medicine,” said Professor Jason Moore, PhD, chair of the Department of Computational Biomedicine, director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Research and Education and chair of the National AI Campus Steering Committee.

“Artificial intelligence has great potential to improve modern life by addressing many of society’s major challenges, particularly those related to human health. At Cedars-Sinai, our ultimate goal is to one day move our findings into the clinic to help patients.”  

AI makes it possible for computers to perform tasks that require human intelligence. Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence in the computer science field. It gives computers the ability to “learn” with data, without being explicitly programmed, and it recognizes patterns in large amounts and diverse types of data to generate important insights.

There are two phases of the National Campus AI program, and each phase lasts four months. To ensure each phase is successful, Huang enlisted Ryan Urbanowicz, PhD, a research assistant professor in the Department of Computational Biomedicine, to serve as director of the campus program, and Joshua Levy, PhD, director of Digital Pathology Research, as associate director.

During Phase One, small interdisciplinary teams of up to 20 people work individually and as a group—online and on their own time—on a project. The teams are led and mentored by experts who have experience in each project topic. Phase One culminates with a showcase of team presentations, including to the Cedars-Sinai research community. This year’s showcase is planned for the summer.

During an optional Phase Two of the program, participants are selected to be part of a global AI competition or a novel Cedars-Sinai-based collaborative research project aiming toward publication in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Cedars-Sinai’s National AI Campus teams won Phase Two competitions in 2023 and have been recognized nationally and internationally.

More than 50 universities across the U.S. also participate in National AI Campus, including 21 historically Black colleges and universities. Cedars-Sinai experts are working to expand the program to California universities and are helping California State University at Dominguez Hills start its own National AI Campus program.

One participant in Cedars-Sinai’s spring 2024 National AI Campus program kickoff said she works in research administration. She noted that she was eager to learn ways to use AI to make data analysis more precise and efficient in her job and to learn skills she could use in other ways.

This feedback aligns with another goal of National AI Campus, Huang said: to create a strong educational resource for students and faculty members and enhance workforce development in AI.

“AI technology is impacting our lives in a major way,” Huang said. “I compare it to when the steam engine came along 300 years ago, bringing dramatic change and transforming industry. AI is another powerful invention that is making significant changes, and although there is some societal anxiety around how to safely use it, I always emphasize that AI will change our life, but it will never replace our life.

“It’s important that Cedars-Sinai harnesses the potential that AI and machine learning offer, and one way we are doing that is through National AI Campus.”

Read more on the Cedars-Sinai Blog: Physician Shadowing Program Offers Students Rare Access

Imagine a world in which the digital watch on your wrist tracks not only your step count, but also your blood sugar, heart rate, blood pressure and respiration. Then, the watch automatically sends a personalized health snapshot to your physician, alerting them to early signs of disease.

That scenario could become reality in the near future, according to Joseph Schwab, MD, director of the Cedars-Sinai Center for Surgical Innovation and Engineering, who is leading innovative research in wearable healthcare technologies.

Schwab, also Cedars-Sinai’s director of Spine Oncology for Orthopaedic Surgery, will present the latest trends in his research about wearable health technology during the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) Annual Meeting in San Francisco, Feb. 12-16. During the conference, Schwab also will participate in the President’s Symposium, sharing insights on generative artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT. He also will discuss healthcare privacy issues that can occur with these technologies.

The Cedars-Sinai Newsroom sat down with Schwab to discuss the scope of his research and how he sees AI impacting the future of healthcare.

What makes your lab different from other research facilities?

My co-director, Hamid Ghaednia, PhD, is a mechanical engineer and our lab is unique in the sense that it is heavily engineering-based. A lot of what we are doing day to day is building things. So rather than test tubes and microscopes, we have lathes and band saws. We have several 3D printers and a whole room dedicated to electronics, where we solder devices together. The research team’s engineering expertise is a key differentiator, and our clinical and engineering partnership is distinctive to what we do. Not only do we have the equipment, but we have the know-how to go with it.

We are one of the few research facilities in the country where we can identify a clinical need, discuss it, come up with a potential solution, build that solution and begin testing, all within one center.

What are a few of the innovations you’re working on?

Our focus area is wearable devices. Consumer wearables on the market are essentially motion trackers. They may have an accelerometer or gyroscope that can simply measure your position or motion to track steps and other data. What we’re doing is different in that our devices are sending energy—in the form of light, electrical energy and sound—into the tissues, and we can measure that energy as it leaves the tissue, and we can deduce things based on how the energy was affected by the tissue.

For example, when you are at the doctor and they use a reflex hammer above your knee to test for a reflex reaction, they are only able to identify the presence or absence of the reflex. Instead, wearable devices that we are developing can quantitate the reflex response—things like how long it took to respond, the robustness of the response, etc. We can give a very specific number connotation to these data points, which we hope will translate into better diagnoses.

How is AI used in the work you do?

The sensors on our wearable devices receive an incredible amount of data from the energy after it has traveled through the tissue, which requires advanced computing power to interpret. At its core, AI is just that—very advanced mathematics and computer programming. We utilize AI to interpret the data captured and correlate it to clinical problems.

Separate from our wearable technologies, we are also able to use AI to make predictions on a smaller scale for use in clinical practice, such as interpreting electronic health data. For instance, a patient may be considering a procedure that has a 5% risk of complication for the whole population; however, using AI to interpret their personal health information, we may learn that their individual complication risk is closer to 25%. This could heavily impact their decision-making. Giving more precise predictions like this is a form of personalized medicine.

Who can benefit from these new technologies?

These technologies can truly benefit everyone across the healthcare spectrum. Patients whose health data is analyzed could receive more personalized care. They could be directed to more precise tests to get an accurate diagnosis and personalized treatments, for example, and may ultimately have better outcomes.

There’s even the potential for a positive impact on healthcare payers and insurance companies by making the right treatment decisions, and thus reducing health expenditures. There are so many opportunities and benefits.  

Where do you see this field headed in the next five to 10 years?

In my opinion, it won’t be too long before we stop using the terms artificial intelligence and machine learning altogether because it will just be integrated into everything we do, running in the background as common practice. It will no longer be a mystery.

As it relates to wearable technologies, I see these becoming part of the expected process of medical assessments. There is the opportunity to learn so much more through these devices than you would glean from a basic physical examination, and the data can be captured in advance of a patient even seeing the provider. A medical appointment can become much more accurate and efficient when the provider has already been able to review and interpret the data collected.

Wearable technology and the integration of AI into the consumption and delivery of healthcare is only going to continue to grow with time, and I think people will become very comfortable and begin to rely on these devices in a good way.

Read more from Cedars-Sinai Discoveries Magazine: Artificial Intelligence Advances

The application—called Xaia, for eXtended-Reality Artificially Intelligent Ally—expands access to mental health support for patients, furthering Cedars-Sinai’s mission to elevate the health of communities it serves in Los Angeles and beyond.

Cedars-Sinai investigators created Xaia as a way to offer patients self-administered, AI-enabled, conversational therapy in relaxing spatial environments such as a creek-side meadow or a sunny beach retreat where patients also can do deep breathing exercises and meditation.

The Xaia application offers users an immersive therapy session led by a trained digital avatar, programmed to simulate a human therapist.

“Apple Vision Pro offers a gateway into Xaia’s world of immersive, interactive behavioral health support—making strides that I can only describe as a quantum leap beyond previous technologies,” said Brennan Spiegel, MD, MSHS, professor of Medicine, director of Health Services Research at Cedars-Sinai and co-founder of the Xaia technology. “With Xaia and the stunning display in Apple Vision Pro, we are able to leverage every pixel of that remarkable resolution and the full spectrum of vivid colors to craft a form of immersive therapy that’s engaging and deeply personal.”

While developing the app for Apple Vision Pro, Spiegel said, his Cedars-Sinai team reimagined how spatial computing can support behavioral health and overall wellbeing in ways never before possible.

Omer Liran, MD, a psychiatrist at Cedars-Sinai and co-founder of Xaia, says the app represents a transformative step in making quality therapy accessible to all.

“Apple Vision Pro has allowed us to create a platform where technology fades into the background and the user's healing journey comes to the forefront,” Liran said. “This application is a culmination of years of rigorous research, clinical expertise and a vision to democratize mental wellness in a way that respects the uniqueness of every individual's experience. Using the powerful capabilities of Vision Pro, we’re now able to bring this experience to life with its full potential.”

Before the launch of Apple Vision Pro, the Xaia technology was featured in a first-of-its-kind study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Digital Medicine. Findings from the study showed Xaia as both beneficial and safe for patient use.

To develop Xaia, Spiegel and Liran enlisted the support of Cedars-Sinai’s Technology Ventures—the enterprise that protects and supports the commercialization of discoveries and technologies. Technology Ventures also facilitates access to promising inventions—like Xaia—that improve the quality of life for patients around the world.

The managing director of Cedars-Sinai’s Technology Ventures, Nirdesh Gupta, PhD, said that ideas developed in an academic medical center environment like Cedars-Sinai offer a one-of-a-kind perspective—focused both on advancing research and expediting clinical care needs.

James Laur, JD, vice president of Intellectual Property at Cedars-Sinai, echoed that sentiment.

“The hospital ecosystem is at the heart of care delivery, and Cedars-Sinai has the unique advantage of being closest to the patients and their varying needs,” said Laur. “Xaia is the result of several years of support and funding, and we are elated to see the technology come to life in this meaningful and clinically relevant way.”

Conflicts of Interest: Spiegel and Liran are co-founders of VRx Health. The Xaia technology is exclusively licensed from Cedars-Sinai to VRx Health for commercialization.

Read more from the Cedars-Sinai Blog: Virtual Reality and the Brain-Body Connection

The results, published in The Lancet Digital Health, include data from patients from three healthcare systems: Cedars-Sinai, Stanford University and Columbia University. All patients in the study underwent a surgical procedure, including open heart surgery, other major surgeries, and minimally invasive procedures involving a catheter or endoscope.

Investigators trained an AI model on pre-operative electrocardiograms, discovering a new use for the 130-year-old test. Invented in the late-1800s, an electrocardiogram is a commonly deployed test that involves placing electrodes on the skin to measure the heart’s electrical activity and assess how well the heart is functioning.  

“This is the first electrocardiogram-based AI algorithm that predicts post-operative mortality,” said David Ouyang, MD, a cardiologist in the Department of Cardiology in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai, and a corresponding author of the study. “Previously, algorithms have been used to assess long-term mortality as well as individual disease states, but determining post-surgical outcomes helps inform the actual decision to do surgery.”

Investigators paired patients’ electrocardiograms from before the surgery or procedure, with their outcomes after the surgery or procedure, and asked the algorithm to find associations or patterns in the electrocardiogram waveforms.

While classifying most patients as low risk, those individuals the algorithm identified as high risk had nearly a 9-fold increased probability of post-operative mortality.

“As it now stands, clinicians only have a modest ability to predict how a patient is going to do after surgery,” said Ouyang, also a faculty member in the Division of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine at Cedars-Sinai. “Current clinical risk prediction tools are insufficient. This AI model could potentially be used to determine exactly which patients should undergo an intervention and which patients might be too sick.”

Every medical intervention comes with risk, and doctors currently rely on guidelines from medical societies to determine a patient’s individual risk.

“In cardiology, we're fortunate to have many life-saving procedures, everything from catheter-based procedures to open-heart surgery, so we're often trying to think about who are the right patients for the right procedure,” said Christine M. Albert, MD, MPH, chair of the Department of Cardiology in the Smidt Heart Institute and the other corresponding author of the study. “A better understanding of risk, particularly by using a commonly obtained diagnostic test, can inform important medical decisions.”

Investigators are currently studying how the algorithm could be translated into a web application that would be widely available for physicians and patients.

Other Cedars-Sinai investigators who worked on the study include John Theurer; Nathan R. Stein, MD; Neal Yuan MD; Grant Duffy; Roopinder K. Sandhu, MD; Joseph Ebinger MD; Patrick Botting; Melvin Jujjavarapu; Michael Nurok, MD; Sumeet S. Chugh, MD; and Susan Cheng, MD.

The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

 Read more in Discoveries: A New Partner In Heart Disease Prediction—AI

Cedars-Sinai also is giving $1 million to the nonprofit community health center to help fund the mobile healthcare program. Healthcare professionals staffing the mobile unit focus on providing care in the area surrounding Cedars-Sinai Marina del Rey Hospital in addition to neighborhoods in South and West Los Angeles.

"This is one of the ways we at Cedars-Sinai are helping address the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles," said Jonathan Schreiber, Cedars-Sinai’s vice president of Community Engagement. “Everyone deserves quality healthcare. That's one of the reasons why we work with partners like Venice Family Clinic in the community. They are able to uniquely serve people experiencing homelessness. It means that we're able to help connect people, not only to permanent and primary healthcare, not only to behavioral healthcare and to dental care, but also to the coordinated entry system, which is the on-ramp to homeless services here in Los Angeles.”

“Cedar-Sinai’s generous support for Venice Family Clinic’s Street Medicine program will expand our ability to provide high-quality healthcare to people experiencing homelessness,” said Mitesh Popat, MD, Venice Family Clinic CEO. “Venice Family Clinic was the first community health center in L.A. County to send healthcare providers into the streets to provide care to our unsheltered neighbors, and it continues to lead the pack by training medical residents, students and other healthcare providers through our Street Medicine curriculum and providing hands-on experience in the field, for which this new mobile unit provides additional opportunities.”

Venice Family Clinic Physician Assistant Carrie Kowalski knows how to help people who find themselves without housing.

“It’s gaining their trust and getting them to really know that you’re on their side that’s crucial,” said Kowalski. “The patients need to know you believe in them as a human and that you believe in their health and their wellness. That’s the key to getting them to accept care and come back.”

At the mobile clinic, Kowalski and other healthcare workers treat patients for a wide range of problems—everything from foot infections and flu shots to high blood pressure and mental health issues.

With the new mobile unit from Cedars-Sinai, Venice Family Clinic now has three mobile units, enabling clinic staff to care for more patients around Los Angeles. While Venice Family Clinic has as many as nine “street medicine” teams who work with people experiencing homelessness, the mobile units enable healthcare professionals to treat patients–especially those in need of in-depth care–in a private, safe setting.

“When I see the newly wrapped van with both Venice Family Clinic’s logo and Cedars-Sinai’s together, it epitomizes the partnership that we have in supporting the community,” said Erin Jackson-Ward, director of Community Giving at Cedars-Sinai. “Improving access to care for the most disadvantaged is a cornerstone of Cedars-Sinai’s community benefit effort and it’s what Venice Family Clinic lives and breathes every day.”

Read more on the Cedars-Sinai Blog: Supporting Homeless Patients in the Emergency Room