Leading-Edge Startup Verticali To Provide Internet Technology Platform For UC Davis-Lawrence Livermore-Tech Industry Consortium

Business Wire, Nov 6, 2000

Business Editors and Health/Medical Writers

SAN FRANCISCO--(BW HealthWire)--Nov. 6, 2000

Vertical*i, an online business-to-business exchange built to help speed the development and commercialization of new pharmaceutical and medical device technologies, will provide its Internet-based technology platform for the Industry Partners Consortium for Bio and Medical Technology Development (IPC), the company announced today.

The IPC, holding its first biannual summit on healthcare technology in San Francisco on Tuesday and Wednesday, is a joint partnership of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of California, Davis, Health System. They aim to hone, develop, and commercialize in-house technologies and product concepts in cooperation with private-sector partners.

"The IPC represents an exchange between some very high-powered and technologically sophisticated partners who collectively have the intellectual property and capital resources to make important things happen in the medical technology space," says Tim O'Connor, Vertical*i's chief executive officer. "These are precisely the kind of players who stand to benefit from our platform."

Making the technology development process more efficient is very much on the minds of the IPC's founders. "There is great untapped potential at Lawrence Livermore and within the UC Davis Health System," says Dr. John Marion, a materials scientist at Livermore who is director of the IPC. Dr. Marion notes that at the Medical School at Davis "groups of extremely talented people are working effectively in cross-disciplinary teams, doing cutting-edge work." However, he says, something has been missing -- the technological, applied-science, and engineering expertise needed to advance good ideas out of the concept stage and into development. "This is the stage where scientists and inventors at Lawrence Livermore can make a major contribution."

But even then, says Dr. Marion, there remains one element crucial for success. "We need a group from the private sector who can look at the projects that either are contemplated or in development -- people who can provide a practical assessment of their commercial prospects. We've learned that it's simply a waste of time to try to develop ideas if you don't get industry involved at an early stage."

The IPC is composed of -- and is recruiting -- partners from the private sector who can provide the missing link. And it will be Vertical*i's role to help all the players work together, by providing a suite of value-added tools and services designed to be used over the duration of the development process, from concept stage to commercialization. "The Vertical*i platform will make a real difference in our web-based collaborative capability," says Dr. Marion.

Vertical*i will help recruit members for the Consortium by providing a public site on which basic details of the Livermore and UC Davis technologies are displayed. At the same time, on a secure portion of the site, IPC members will be able to view in-depth commercialization studies which are made by the Consortium's Advisory Board in cooperation with the developers of the listed intellectual properties. Dr. Marion says he expects this secure function "to be an incentive for interested browsers of the public portion of the site to become IPC members."

To O'Connor, this demonstrates one of the great advantages of using the Internet to facilitate technology development. "It can introduce potential partners who, before coming to our site, have no notion of one another's existence or mutual interest. Prior to using Vertical*i, they also may have no real sense of how quickly and efficiently they can help solve one another's problems. One of the ways we help transform the development process is by opening the door to 'contributors,' or third party experts of various kinds, who help move the principal parties beyond snafus and logjams that so often lead to dead-ends."

"The beauty of the IPC," says Leslie Sandberg, the chief liaison officer for the UC Davis Health System, "is that it will bring a lot of curious, intelligent people together -- and that's exciting." But even more significant, she says, is the fact they will be bringing to market products and technologies that have practical value to clinicians and researchers. "This is a venture that will move technology from lab bench to marketplace to bedside. These technologies are going to have an enormous beneficial impact on people who are ill."