Dive Brief:
- Partners HealthCare has announced its 2016 innovation grants program, in which it will provide up to $1 million in total to employees with ideas for "a drug, device, diagnostic, healthcare IT, or other product or service" that promises to improve health or healthcare delivery.
- Any one of Partners’ 64,000 employees and those with PI privileges at a PHS-affiliated institution are eligible to apply for 10 grants of up to $100,000 each.
- Partners' Innovation Discovery Grants (IDG) program is aimed at helping to commericialize research occurring within the Partners HealthCare community.
Dive Insight:
The small-scale grants are aimed at helping to develop early-stage concepts.
“These grants, while relatively modest in terms of dollar amount, are important and unique as they allow for innovators to make major scientific advances at a critical time early in the discovery process,” said Jay Austen, MD, chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, in a prepared statement. “Without these grants many promising ideas could not possibly get developed as quickly for our patients."
Partners has a research budget of $1.5 billion and has also been working to heighten its collaborations in the life sciences industry through deals to license technology and spin off companies, notes the Boston Globe,.
This is the second year for Partners' innovation grants program. In 2015 the health system awarded 20 employees (out of 350 applicants) with $50,000 grants.