Deal-making between universities and medical device companies has historically been limited. Not only are such deals often too pricey for device companies, the nature of medical device innovation--more likely to be incremental improvements than quantum leaps forward--gives physicians and entrepreneurs an edge over universities. But that may be changing, as this look at university/medical device deals in the first half of 1997 shows.

Often started by the academic inventors or their laboratory acolytes, biotechs offer equity participations (to universities and researchers) as well as focused attention to their inventions. As large companies have steadily invested in and improved their own discovery operations, in particular going further into the basic research which is the stuff of academic labs, they find themselves positioned to exploit university research in a more focused way-and thus are more willing than ever to do universi