Medical Innovation Needs Silicon Valley Speed, Stat

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Ive been directing or advising innovation and commercialization efforts in Silicon Valley for most of my career. While the popular stories we tell about innovation usually focus on eureka moments and brilliant individuals, anyone involved in successful innovation knows that getting a new product to market is often more about convincing smart people to back your idea, corralling lots of different agendas, aligning incentives, and navigating bureaucracies.

I was reminded of this very important difference between invention and impactful innovation when I attended the One Mind for Research conference at UCLA recently.One Mind for Researchis a new nonprofit that serves as a catalyst for discovering and delivering breakthrough cures for brain disease, co-founded by Garen Steglin, a successful VC and CEO, and Patrick Kennedy, former Congressmen and nephew of JFK, and now led by Pete Chiarelli, U.S. Army General (retired).This was a gathering of top university neuroscientists, celebrities like Glenn Close and Maria Shiver, foundations, industry senior executives, government officials, patients, and advocates.

A Burden on Patients, Employers, and The Economy

This is an area desperately in need of innovation. Brain diseases and trauma are a leading cause of disability globally,according to WHO; one in six American adults lives with a brain-related illness such as depression, PTSD, autism, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. Add an aging boomer population susceptible to stroke and Alzheimers and this enormous disease burden has far more wide-ranging effects than you might imagine.

Chronic brain disease is a burden not just to patients but to employers and the economy. PWC estimates that more than $500 billion is spent annually in the U.S. on healthcare related costs for brain disease. If we include the cost of disability, losses to the economy of people who can no longer contribute to their full ability or the people who are pulled out of the workforce to care for disabled loved ones, the total cost of brain disease in the U.S. this year will approach $1 trillion.

Two Decades Is Too Long To Wait for A Cure

Despite clear market demand for improved treatment for brain diseases, innovation in this area is proceeding at a glacial pace. Ive learned this in a painful way. Several people very close to me have struggled with different forms of brain disease--in some cases for years--without clinically available tests for doctors to make a definitive diagnosis, much less prescribe a targeted course of treatment. The parable of the blind man and the elephant comes to mind as the patient visits different doctors in a cycle of hope and ultimate disappointment (and heartache) when the prescription didnt work as planned.

Good doctors are left with no choice but to say, I dont know. The gap between clinical practice and medical advances in this age of bionic brains, IBM's Watson, and $1,000 genomes is nothing less than shocking.There has got to be a better way.Searching for answers, I went to learn more about the state-of-the-art in brain disease treatment At the One Mind for Research conference.

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Medical Innovation Needs Silicon Valley Speed, Stat