How Does Mayo Ventures Collaborate with Industry to Drive Innovation? | LSI USA '25

Auriel August  0:06  
Great. Well, thank you everyone for being here, and thank you to Nier and the Mayo Clinic Team for asking me to moderate this panel. My name is Ariel Agus. I'm with Sante Ventures. We are an early stage Life Science venture firm, and have had the pleasure of collaborating many times this Mayo Clinic, both on the BD side, as well as investing with Mayo Clinic ventures, and then all of the cool technologies that spin out of the university and healthcare system. And so maybe we'll quickly have the panel go across and introduce themselves and see what you're speaking with today. 

Nir Goldenberg  0:35  
Sure happy start. Nir Goldenberg, director of technology development, I'm leading the technology development function for Mayo ventures.

Peter Noseworthy  0:44  
Hi, I'm Peter Noseworthy. I'm a cardiac electrophysiologist, the chair of the division of EP, and I'm the medical director for business development, which is the two divisions Mayo Clinic ventures and corporate development. 

Janani Reisenauer  0:56  
I'm Janani Reisenauer. I'm a thoracic surgeon, chair of the thoracic surgery group there, and then one of the medical directors in business development, working closely with Peter, focused on research innovation. 

Waleed Brinjikji  1:06  
And my name is Waleed Brinjikji. I'm a neuro interventional radiologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and I'm also an assistant medical director in business development. 

Auriel August  1:16  
Fantastic. Maybe we'll start with Dr Noseworthy. Maybe be helpful. Just to give a quick overview of mayo ventures and how you integrate both venture investing and technology transfer out of the healthcare system.

Peter Noseworthy  1:27  
Yeah. So those are the two main functions for business development at Mayo. Maybe it's important to put it in a bit of a context of how it developed. Like most universities, it started as a technology transfer office, which at most institutions, is sort of a bureaucratic function, usually supported on indirects from research funding and things like that. At Mayo Clinic, we take a different approach. We're on our own P and L, the revenue that we generate through our licenses supports our office, and over the last 30 years, we've grown to be over 130 people. This year, we'll bring in 150 million top line revenue for Mayo Clinic, and we're there to support our team and also to support Mayo Clinic's mission the other side of the house. So if our technology development and enablement office is all about recognizing our intellectual property internally and turning it into products and services that meet the needs of patients around the world, the other side of the house is recognizing that not everything that we need at Mayo Clinic, we can build all on our own, and a lot of that has to come through partnerships. So it functions more like a corporate VC and strategic partnering arm of Mayo Clinic, recognizing that we need to bring in new technologies, new capabilities, to advance our practice and differentiate who we are, and we do that through partnering. So we we have the ability to make investments along the continuum of the spectrum of technology development enablement and partnerships, including non dilutive grant funding supporting SBIR opportunities. And then we have a venture fund for our internal technologies. And then we also have a strategic business development capital fund that we use to forge these partnerships and align our interests with our strategic partners.

Auriel August  3:08  
And maybe for a group like this, what makes the most sense, as far as interacting with Mayo Clinic and your technology and maybe even your physicians? 

Peter Noseworthy  3:18  
Do you want to take that Nir and then I can add some color.

Nir Goldenberg  3:22  
Yeah, I think, of course, there are a couple of buckets which are relevant. Of course, there are many companies that are looking to, you know, collaborate with mail around sponsored research, right? So clinical trials and joint clinical work, we are happy to help with connecting companies to the right, pis and investigators within mayo, in addition. And this is more us, you know, we are kind of leading everything related to business development for the enterprise, and that includes, you know, mail technologies that could be licensed out to companies in order to advance their technologies and their pipelines and portfolios, and also, of course, investments in different companies. So we kind of cover the whole spectrum of, you know, technology development, which includes Mayo technologies and joint work with industry in order to bring, as Peter mentioned, new solutions to patients. And we also lead everything related to investment. So these are the key buckets, right? So sponsored research collaboration with business development in the context of advancing new technologies and bringing them to and bringing them to patients and, of course, investments. 

Peter Noseworthy  4:25  
And it's probably worth calling out that there are, there are some things that we don't really do a lot of. So we're not likely to be making an investment only in an early stage startup company. We would be looking, of course, to find some sort of synergy with our own intellectual property, KOLs, sponsored research, something like that, that aligns our interests. Similarly, we're a big health system, and of course, we have many customer a customer of many companies in a vendor Vendee relationship. And we look there are probably some of those that could be reimagined as a co development opportunity, especially as we are doing things. That are unique or innovative within our practice,

Auriel August  5:02  
maybe pulling on that thread a little bit of kind of you mentioned somewhat noise, like a corporate VC, where you'll become a customer. Is there an example of one of those investments where is looking at something that really makes sense to integrate into Mayo Clinic, and that's why you're 

Peter Noseworthy  5:15  
Do you want to do? 

Janani Reisenauer  5:16  
Yeah, sure. So one such example is a company that is heavily focused on AR and VR technologies in the operating room and how to incorporate augmented reality to facilitate safer, faster, smarter, smoother procedures in the operating room. That was a company that approached Mayo Clinic early. They met with some key opinion leaders at Mayo Clinic. We identified three to four areas of novel use cases that Mayo could lend our clinical know how and our clinical input to cultivate and accelerate growth of that specific use case. And so that was a company that started working with us very closely and relying on our know how. And Mayo Clinic subsequently turned around and made a significant investment in that company. And that's just once, one example of many case vignettes that are out there of how it was a mutually beneficial partnership to really drive a technology and bring it directly to patients faster

Auriel August  6:10  
and maybe from within the institution. How is Mayo Clinic help fostering innovation from within?

Janani Reisenauer  6:15  
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think it's obvious that, just based on the attendance at this meeting alone, the industry is flooded with a lot of technologies, and for a healthcare organization with a robust armamentarium of physicians, it becomes very difficult to get all the physicians out there to see all the things that are out there and make a diligent landscape assessment. So we decided that rather than going to meetings like this for the general physicians to foster a culture of innovation, that we would open our doors and invite industry in. And so with that novel concept, I co founded an innovation summit about three years ago in partnership with Lisa Carmel, who's in the audience, and we started it out in the surgical space, and have done that for three to four years now. Thank you for participating last year where we do just that. We invite VCs, startups, strategics, all in the room with Mayo Clinic investigators to really drive conversations around collaboration. And it's gone really well to where this year we are now launching our inaugural cardiovascular and radiology summit as well. And I think that's a nice formula to put a lot of physicians in a meeting like this, where typically you don't have as robust of a clinical presence. And that's just one way to renovate the innovation culture at Mayo.

Waleed Brinjikji  7:38  
Yeah. And on the other side, there's a lot of organic innovation that's going on within mayo, we have 1000s of physicians and scientists who are working on inventions and products of their own, through their research labs, through collaborations with each other, and Mayo has been extremely supportive in helping physicians And scientists spin out their technologies, whether it's in partnership with other companies or in creating their own companies through programs such as our employee entrepreneurship program. So for example, in around 2019 I had started a company with one of my partners in the practice. We looked at our technology, and we actually felt strongly that, you know, it was something that we could try to get to market, because it was just a 510 k, I know it's, there's no such thing as just a 510 k, but we thought that we could do it.

Auriel August  8:32  
And no visit should ever say just a 510 k, yeah,

Waleed Brinjikji  8:36  
I know it's but, but, you know, Mayo was incredibly supportive, gave us a lot of educational, you know, opportunities and courses we learned about customer discovery, you know, the basics of business helped us connect with, you know, appropriate, you know, contract manufacturers up in the Twin Cities, you know, got us connected to that ecosystem. Some people at MCV, even, you know, plugged us into some of their investor networks. And you know, this is just taking two physicians that only knew science and then turning them into business men. And you know, thankfully, we were even able to exit through that kind of a program. So these are ways where Mayo really is trying to help foster early stage innovation. I could

Peter Noseworthy  9:19  
talk a little bit about the scale of that. So we get about 800 ideas disclosed to our office every year, per year. Yeah, every year. And from that, we end up licensing, or have revenue generating licenses from about 250 and on average, we form about one new startup with that foundational IP every month. So the scope and scale of it is, I think, tremendous. The other thing that we've done is, whereas most technology transfer offices are kind of that passive function, we take a much more active role in seeking out the IP, figuring out what has commercial value, and then supporting it along the continuum. So we have technology development associate. Kids that are embedded in our practice and embedded in our research labs, attending research meetings, understanding what the ideas are that are coming out of our enterprise, and then identifying those that that likely have some commercial value and fostering them in their development. I think it's been a much more successful model, and I think it's kind of what sets us apart, maybe

Nir Goldenberg  10:20  
just to add a bit more there, as Walid and Peter mentioned, you know, we have a vast internal portfolio of technologies, you know, and across the whole spectrum, starting from Biopharma assets through diagnostics devices and, you know, software AI. And every year, just as an example, additional example, we, you know, around new patent filing, we file 100 new patents every year. And you know, for example, just one more number for licensing deals. We do around 150 deals a year. So the portfolio is vast. And I welcome, you know, our colleagues from industry to reach out to us in order to see if we can help in any way to advance technology, different technologies and and help companies to bring new solutions to patients together?

Auriel August  11:01  
Yeah, maybe another question, having taken early stage technology that you were as a physician founder, spinning it out of Mayo Clinic, that's a pretty common thing amongst early stage innovators. A lot of technologies come out of these different healthcare institutions, maybe you could speak to maybe some of the challenges. Obviously, there's a lot of support from Mayo has through early development, through commercialization. But what are some of the challenges of spinning technologies out of universities from someone that's had experiences with offices of life? Six technologies?

Waleed Brinjikji  11:30  
Yeah. I mean, there are always challenges, right? You know, for example, you know, anytime someone's taking technology out of a institution, you start shopping it around in terms of, when you're talking about acquisition and everything and all the major strategics. You know, there's always balking at royalties and things like that. But in the end, it always works out because, you know, that's just the way it is. You know, this institution's got to make money off of its intellectual property, and the way we do that is through royalties. But I found that to be a challenge that it was surprising at the time, but now I know for future things, it's just something. You're just gonna have to deal with it, and you're gonna go through the negotiations, and in the end, it's gonna work out. I do think that there's also kind of like a mindset change for physician founders, because, you know, we're used to a very linear process. When we were in medical school. You do A, B and C, and you get the MD, and then you get your MD and DO A, B and C, and then you finally get to go work, right? And just so linear, right? But then with startups, it's near death experience after near death experience, and you're out there on your own, and it's kind of, it's awesome, but it's also like terrifying. But, you know, we're not trained to think that way in medicine, so it's not necessarily, you know, it's not the institution's problem. It's your problem. You're the founder. But you know, even just preparing people for the fact that, look, this is going to be a long and arduous journey, and there's very little glamor until the end, if you can make it. But not anybody, not everybody makes it.

Auriel August  13:16  
Maybe just generally, to the panel, how do you counsel? Physician, founders, new companies when they're when they are ready to fi the nest, when we're ready to maybe look for outside funding. Is there a certain stage? Is it different for different companies? Is there a formal process that you go through, like this, is ready to launch? Just curious.

Nir Goldenberg  13:37  
So you're referring to our own internal Yes, yeah. So, so, you know, we are doing, we have a pretty interesting internal process around which we identify the right commercialization pathways for each technologies, right? So some of them would fit, you know, new venture formation pathway, and then we'll create a new company, and then we'll let the company run. Of course, that would come, typically with our own investment, and typically, we will also partner with other investment groups and CO invest in order to, you know, kind of provide the right and appropriate baseline or position for the new company, and then for other assets, you know, we will strive towards, kind of, you know, licensing those directly to industry, right? And then, of course, across the whole spectrum, from multinationals all the way to startups, right? So we have a couple of internal teams with just amazing expertise, right? So we have internal IP team, so patent liaisons, technology development managers, as Peter mentioned, and also licensing and contracting people, in addition to corporative people that are all sitting, you know, on a weekly basis and assessing our strategies and tactics for each asset or technology. So that's kind of the internal decision making. I think

Peter Noseworthy  14:45  
there's been a culture change in terms of the maturity of the of the ideas that are coming to us. There was a time when there was a pretty clear firewall between the practice of medicine and innovation or research and. Innovation. And in that world, the ideas would come out Mayo Clinic ventures would bring the expertise on how to bring those to market with a clear demarcation. I think now physicians often are coming to us already with some interest from investors, already a strategic that might be expressing some interest, some partners, some some market savvy. So we're finding that our relationship with innovators is very different, innovator to innovator. There's also been a lot of efforts to bring up the basic level of competence in this space of formula clinic

Auriel August  15:32  
physicians after experience after near death experience. Yes,

Peter Noseworthy  15:35  
exactly. So giving them more experience, but also giving them some formal didactics. So we have a training program within our education shield, and then these summits, for instance, the cardiology summit the day before, we'll bring all of all of you to Mayo is a boot camp for our physicians and scientists to really learn about this. So we're seeing, we're seeing a big change in the, I think, nationally, but also at Mayo Clinic as a microcosm, yeah. And I think

Auriel August  15:59  
that's obviously very positive for the ecosystem. The closer we can bring together industry and scientists to advance medicine. Look, this process will continue to be more efficient and better for patients.

Nir Goldenberg  16:10  
I think, in addition, you know, for us, kind of seeing more mature technologies that are already kind of that has an initial potential with industry, there is a lot, and we are leading that there is a lot of more kind of build to buy phase. We're working closely with the industry, and again, across the whole spectrum, you know, starting from big companies all the way to startups around, kind of sitting together, you know, from the onset, kind of the early stages of the technology journey. And thinking, does this make sense from all perspectives? Right? Technological, clinical, commercial. And we think there is a huge potential there around build to buy plays, if you do it properly. And

Auriel August  16:43  
if anyone was in the earlier panel about build to buys with and driven, we won't touch that for now. But maybe Nira also touched on, maybe your investment criteria within Mayo Clinic for new innovations. You have a How are you all thinking? I know there's a kind of a broad spectrum, from just straight licensing to spinning out a company, but what are the key things that you all are looking at when you're filtering the 600 things that are disclosed every year?

Nir Goldenberg  17:11  
Yeah, we always start from, you know, the from our mission, so, like, the clinical impact, right? That's kind of our baseline, our starting point, right? You know, our mission is we start always with the needs of the patient, right? And for us, that's not a cliche. That's truly our mission for male ventures and For Mayo Clinic, right? So we start there. And we, you know, when we are assessing our own internal technologies, and also when we are assessing, you know, investments, you know, for startups, you know, we always start from there is this technology? You know, can this technology truly bring the significant impact and value proposition to patients? Is this truly novel, truly different? And also, we are assessing, you know, for the company's ability to close the loop. So we are not in the business of building bridges to nowhere. We want to see a strong team, a strong, smart and savvy approach towards commercialization that will eventually bring the novel, new technology all the way to patients. So we assess for that. We're also very privileged to have very strong, just amazing internal teams that are doing a very comprehensive due diligence work, kind of covering all the cardio aspects, starting from assessment of the technology itself, the clinical aspect and the commercial aspects. So we have very strong internal investment committees. And then, according to our diligence, we, you know, we're very proud in our ability to find and identify prominent companies that are truly moving the needle and bringing new solutions to patients regarding the more kind of technical criteria, right? We start from, you know, we invest super early. We've mentioned that we do new venture formation, we do pre seed, seed investments, and we go all the way to Series C, typically, regarding check sizes, we would start from very small, 200k and go all the way up, typically, to 5 million. That would be our range. And we also, we do not lead rounds. And of course, when we are assessing investment opportunities, we focus both on the financial aspect but also on the strategic fit side of things. And so that's kind of in a nutshell, our strategic approach for investments,

Auriel August  19:13  
and then maybe pulling back again on part opportunities for partnership with industry. Obviously, you do a lot with innovators, but from the large strategics, from the corporates, how does Mayo Clinic interact with them?

Janani Reisenauer  19:26  
Yeah, I can, I can talk to that. I mean, I think the strategics is, is it? The benefit of that is that the strategic such touch such a broad component across the Mayo Clinic ecosystem, an imaging company may touch various components across the procedural practice as well as the surgical practice and radiology, for example. So obviously, when we talk to strategics, the conversation is a little bit different. We have a very, I would say, symbiotic relationship, where we're constantly in conversations about technologies that they're excited about. On and are looking at over the horizon technologies that we're excited about looking over the horizon. There may also be strategic discussions, for example, Mayo clinics in the process of expanding our hospital infrastructure and building in a new infrastructure that we want to be very patient centered and human oriented. But in the background, have all the technological mechanisms embedded into that infrastructure that are not disruptive to patients and allow for transition less care through different phases of acuity of care. So the strategics are typically who we look to to guide us, partner with us, and help us take on endeavors of that nature and broader, larger enterprise wide collaborations. It

Peter Noseworthy  20:41  
forces us to have two very different mentalities about the way we approach our business within our group. So out of 130 people, some of us are focused on a much more opportunistic side of the business, essentially taking all these ideas, making sense of them, figuring what has most commercial value, and bringing those to market. The more strategic side of the business is really about understanding what are our board directed strategic objectives, and how can we implement Mayo Clinic strategy? So we're sort of an effector arm for our, you know, 10 year strategy, and that's when we start to make investments with much larger check size, and we go up to about 20 million, and then follow on, of course. So, but we have to be able to do both of those things and do them well, and they're a very different skill

Auriel August  21:22  
set. Can you speak to maybe some of the strategic priorities of Mayo Clinic on the 1020, year scale? Yeah.

Peter Noseworthy  21:31  
So our 2030 plan is around the idea of cure, connect and transform. So cure is around new technologies and cures. Connect is how we use data to improve care and transform is finding new ways to deliver care. So maybe I'll give you one example of each of those. But on the transform idea, we were hearing a little bit about building entirely new hospital of the future, digitally enabled, blending the physical and the virtual and creating a new patient experience. We've also made investments to bring some of our care outside of the hospital, not just connected care, but actually hospital level care within the home. So we've made large investments in a company that's enabling that for us, particularly in Florida and on the data side, we've made very large investments in Mayo Clinic platform, essentially to create a accessible, de identified, comprehensive, multi omic imaging, structured and unstructured data asset that can be used for discovery and validation, and then creates a backbone that we can use to deploy digital health technologies into our practice, and then A platform for all kinds of transactions across the healthcare ecosystem. So those have been some of the big, you know, biggest strategy, type of investments that we've been enabling. Fantastic.

Auriel August  22:54  
Maybe I'll go across the panel and just ask, are there exciting new trends, emerging things in healthcare that you're seeing, that maybe you're particularly working with the mayor, even outside of the institution you'll start with the end,

Waleed Brinjikji  23:07  
yeah. So, so for me, you know, one thing that I'm most excited about is bringing health care into the home. You know, we look at, all, you know, like people from, from my generation, like the last thing I want to do is to go to a doctor's office or to go to a hospital, if there's anything I can do, to have my visit at home, to get all the care that I need at home, whether it's through some, you know, virtual visits and things like that, that's what I want. So you look at all the technologies, whether it's, you know, the continuous glucose monitoring, whether it's being able to adjust your pacemaker remotely, whether it's virtual visits, etc. These are the things that I think are going to be leading the future of health care, health care and wellness care.

Janani Reisenauer  23:52  
I'll wear my surgeon hat for a second and talk about the surgical space. There's a couple of things that I think that are on the horizon that are really exciting. But first and foremost, the real world problems, the pragmatic problems of today, are all embedded in administrative bloat and administrative workload. And in addition to incredibly being short staffed, there's also a lot of administrative burden. So one of the key focuses for Mayo Clinic is automation. And I think that could take a variety of different routes. You could talk about automation in surgery and developing tools to automate various portions of the procedure. You could also look at it from the spin of automation of administrative and clerical task burden, and how to mitigate that in the setting of a staffing shortage and a limited workforce, robotics, I think, is obviously here to stay and will continue to expand and continue to grow. And then I'd be remiss to not use the word AI at least once in this panel, so I'll throw that out there as well.

Peter Noseworthy  24:50  
Dr naswar, yeah, I would say Mayo's built its reputation and who it is based on its practice. And we have a, I think, a unique. Highly engineered, integrated, multi specialty group practice built around meeting the needs of patients. And we're making very large investments in each of our sites, Florida, Arizona and in Minnesota, to create new physical spaces for the delivery of care, and hopefully new models for how care is delivered. And that is going to require hundreds, if not more, partnerships and forward thinking collaborations about how we can deliver care in a way that is unique and sets a new standard for health care. So in Rochester, we're making a $5 billion investment that'll almost double the physical footprint of the Mayo Clinic hospitals on our downtown campus. And just two weeks ago, at the our trustees meeting, we announced the same thing in Arizona. And right now, that's a bit of a blank slate, but we're coming up with all kinds of phenomenal ideas about how we can leverage technology, and in particular, try to make the technology as invisible to the patient as possible, so that patients feel as much as possible, that it's about a human interaction, and that all of that is facilitated by technology. So I hope we get that right, and then I hope that it's repeated over and over, around the country and around the world as a template.

Auriel August  26:16  
Yeah, and before moving to Nir, actually wanted to pull on that a bit. If you heard Lisa Earnhardt's talk earlier. I'm curious if any of this space dedicated to healthcare, right, right now, it's very much sick care. You come to the hospital once you're sick, is there any thought within Mayo of moving into preventative care and actually putting more resources towards that, which is an issue with the US healthcare system as a whole? Yeah,

Peter Noseworthy  26:37  
I think so. We basically want to blend the physical and the virtual and the in the digital. We want to blend inpatient, outpatient, hospital care and clinic care into a space. So rather than organizing around the silos that we have cardiology, thoracic surgery, radiology, it's around the patient, and we're creating a model around the idea of neighborhoods, so clusters of clinicians that come together in a multidisciplinary way to meet the needs of a patient across a continuum. So then we have infrastructure. We could reach people at home, we could bring people in for acute care if they need something brief, and get them out. And we would have co localized surgical suites, procedural suites, inpatient beds, to create this sort of new model. I think it's a huge undertaking.

Auriel August  27:22  
You guys can do it. I hope we can do it. Hope we can do it, that one can, but that's exactly

Peter Noseworthy  27:27  
the idea. Yeah,

Janani Reisenauer  27:29  
and playing off of something that that you mentioned, Ariel, I think one of the key areas at least, that the research shield is really focused on is exactly what you said, prevention of disease. One of the core strategic priorities of the research shield is to prevent end organ failure to the point of needing transplantation. And with all the challenges that there is with supply and demand of organs in the current state, what are opportunities to identify organ failure before it happens, and how can you restitute that organ before the point of transplant? So in addition to designing physical spaces and virtual and physical integration on a pure basic science bio therapy level, that's an area that's a huge strategic, strategic focus for the research shield is identifying disease theoretically before it occurs and what we can do to prevent

Waleed Brinjikji  28:13  
it. Yeah, and just, you know, building on that, you know, last week, you know, we had requests for proposals in this kind of pre cure area, and we had over 150 proposals from our physicians and scientists specifically on this area. So it's a major strategic priority, and there's lots of intellectual energy being dedicated towards it,

Auriel August  28:33  
fantastic, maybe in the last bit of time.

Nir Goldenberg  28:35  
Think, I think we see a lot of focus around, how do you harness innovation towards kind of increasing efficiency without compromising quality of care, right? And for us, for Mayo Clinic, you know, we would like to see, can we further scale up, you know, the excellency that was built around our care, the care that we provide to patients, is impressive. Can we use innovation to further scale it up and to touch more patients without compromising the quality. And that kind of goes back to, you know, automation and robotics and AI and so on so forth. These are all very good, you know, instruments that can help us with that mission.

Auriel August  29:12  
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much to our panel. It was a great discussion. I don't think we have time for questions, but thanks everyone for their attention.