Each month, Start-Up presents a survey of technology transfer deals--licensing agreements between companies and universities or other research institutions--in the fields of life sciences, including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, in vitro diagnostics and research/analytical instrumentation and reagents.

The past couple of years have witnessed the formation of more than a dozen companies focused on taking a portfolio of very early stage medical devices to the next level. With good ideas and connections, device industry executives, as an alternative to joining operating companies are increasingly joining incubators where they can keep their hands in device company creation over a number of projects. Whether you call these companies incubators or accelerators, they all share the goal of filling a gap between technology and company creation, and funding. Accelerators can help early stage concepts get the hearing they normally might not get either in the venture capital community, which is prepared to take on clinical and market risk but not technological risk, or large companies, which are focused on maintaining existing businesses. In fact, for certain kinds of broadly-enabling platform technologies that cut across clinical specialties, the incubator/accelerator model makes a lot of sense.

Each month, Start-Up presents a survey of technology transfer deals--licensing agreements between companies and universities or other research institutions--in the fields of life sciences, including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, in vitro diagnostics and research/analytical instrumentation and reagents.

Ten years ago, a group of executives launched Jomed with the thought of challenging the large cardiovascular device companies as a global player. Jomed never quite achieved that goal--though it came close. Now, with an innovative NO-loaded balloon, some former Jomed executives hope to do in interventional neurology what they tried to do in interventional cardiology.