Heritage Provider Network Launches Innovative Business Plan And Startup Competition With The National Institute Of Health And The Center For Advancing Innovation

BETHESDA , Md., Sept. 30, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- A world-wide, open innovation competition to bring promising brain related inventions to market has been launched by the Heritage Provider Network (HPN) in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Center for Advancing Innovation (CAI). The goal of the Neuro Startup Challenge is to create new startups based on NIH-conceived and developed commercially viable inventions that are the topics of the challenge. Heritage is providing the funding for the challenge. CAI is orchestrating all elements of the challenge.

The challenge asks teams of graduate-level medical, post-docs, business students as well as seasoned entrepreneurs to create strategic business plans and launch startups to develop and commercialize 16 unlicensed brain-related inventions.  The inventions include therapeutics, diagnostics, prognostics, and devices.  The disease areas cover life threatening illnesses, rare diseases and debilitating conditions, including but not limited to acute ischemic stroke, neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, traumatic brain injury, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, thioesterase deficiency disorders, glioblastoma and astrocytomas, Neurofibromatosis type 1, and vascular disease.
Please see our website for a list of the eligible inventions: http://www.neurostartupchallenge.org/inventions.html

"We take great pride in launching the Neuro Startup Challenge with the NIH and CAI," said Dr. Richard Merkin, Founder and CEO, HPN.  "We are excited to harness the power of NIH's innovations and assemble the best minds in the world in an effort to improve the standard of care for brain related injuries and disorders as well as improve brain functions. At Heritage we have always believed that prevention is the best cure," he continued.  "We also believe that if we as a Country could spend less money on providing care after people are sick and more money on finding cures to keep them healthy we could change the trajectory of health care in the United States.  We hope that the new businesses created by the challenge will provide innovative methods for preventing and curing brain disorders." 

"We all have the common goal of ensuring that discoveries made at NIH are 'translated' when the scientific advances have the potential to benefit the public and have been well vetted," said Story Landis, Ph.D., director of the NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Rosemarie Truman, Founder and CEO of CAI said: "Given the global importance of brain research with the Brain Initiative in the US as well as outside the US with initiatives such as the Human Brain Project in Europe and Brainnetome in China, we expect that this challenge will create a novel platform to galvanize the global ecosystem in combating brain-related illnesses. We are thrilled by the opportunity to help accelerate and increase the volume of progress for brain-related health concerns by building on the unique framework created with the Breast Cancer Startup Challenge (BCSC). We have scaled the model we used with the BCSC so that this challenge can serve as a pillar to institutionalize spinoffs across HHS and other Federal labs."

Entries are being accepted now on this website: www.neurostartupchallenge.org. The deadline to submit entries is November 31^st 2014. Sixteen NIH intramural inventions are the topics of the challenge and a maximum of 30 teams can compete per invention.  Once a team enters, they may start to work on the Phase I deliverables, an executive summary and elevator speech; both will be non-confidential. In January 2015, five winners per invention will be selected for the chance to compete in Phase II, the business plan phase. In the business plan phase, teams will create 10-page business plans and perform a live pitch to our panel of judges. In the final phase of the challenge, Phase III, the teams will create a startup, raise seed funding and negotiate a license to the invention they selected.

The winners of Phase II, the business plan portion of the challenge, will be selected by a panel of judges that include world-renowned experts in brain research, venture capitalists, philanthropic leaders, large pharma executives, seasoned entrepreneurs, the core team and more. Please find our impressive judges panel here: http://www.neurostartupchallenge.org/judges-and-supporters.html

ABOUT NIH: 
National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.

ABOUT HPN:
Heritage Provider Network, Inc. (HPN) is on the cutting edge of the accountable care model of healthcare delivery: coordinated, patient-doctor centric, integrated health care systems that represent the future of health care in the United States. HPN and its affiliates operate in California, New York and Arizona providing high quality, cost effective healthcare to over 700,000 individuals and are dedicated to quality, affordable health care, and putting patients' wellness first. (www.heritageprovidernetwork.com)

ABOUT CAI:
The Center for Advancing Innovation (CAI) is a global public-private partnership non-profit focused on creating a virtuous circle of innovation and driving growth breakthroughs through novel, creative paradigms and models.  CAI's mission is to accelerate and increase the volume of technology transfer, translational research, commercialization and entrepreneurship in various fields of research, including biomedical research, to make more research available to the world for educational and innovation purposes, improve the economy and positively impact world health.  For more information about CAI, please visit http://www.thecenterforadvancinginnovation.org.

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SOURCE Heritage Provider Network, Inc.