Lankenau Ventures: New Business Model Moves Health Workers’ Inventions to Market
Acapreneurial™ Initiative Combines Commercialization, Research and Innovation
Lankenau Ventures is a new business established to accelerate development and commercialization of medical inventions conceived by frontline healthcare workers. It is an initiative comprising a leading medical research institute and commercialization and entrepreneurship experts.
The joint venture includes the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research (LIMR; the research division of Main Line Health) and L2C Partners, both in Philadelphia, and Early Charm in Baltimore.
“Main Line Health’s deep belief in the power of their frontline health workers to invent the future of healthcare motivated us to join their effort,” said Ken Malone, Executive Officer of Early Charm. “Their unique organizational vision, trademarked under the name acapreneurialTM, combines academic elements of medicine, research and the entrepreneurial efforts of commercialization.”
Lankenau Ventures will license inventions from LIMR that focus on the operating room, the hospital patient room, and other healthcare venues. In commercializing those inventions, the qualities of safety, quality and efficacy will be matched with market demand to determine priorities for product development.
“Each of the healthcare professionals who have developed these innovations have many years of experience in patient care,” said George Prendergast, PhD, President and CEO of LIMR. “When they saw a need for better tools to improve patient care, comfort, and outcomes, they invented new ways to address that need.”
In its launch period, Lankenau Ventures will focus on four categories of clinical products for the healthcare market, each of which are in various stages of product development:
- Hospital room and facility safety devices, including a limb support device and a fall prevention device;
- Software that provides add-on components to electronic medical records;
- Clinical tests, including two rapid assays for tissue metabolic markers;
- Clinical devices, including ones to prevent nerve injuries or preserve toileting privacy.
“Lankenau Ventures formation builds on our experience with Early Charm’s highly successful efforts at bringing inventions to market, combined with our work helping LIMR traverse the many stages in converting ideas into patentable inventions and moving those inventions to viable products. We are delighted to bring the two together,” said Merle Gilmore, founder and CEO of L2C Partners.
About Early Charm:
Early Charm is a venture studio based in the Charm City (Baltimore) that creates, owns and operates companies in four different industry verticals: Advanced Materials, Drug Discovery, AG Tech and Engineered Products. Early Charm continuously engages with industry to identify current market needs. Once those market needs are assessed, we source cutting-edge technologies that fulfill those needs and develop and commercialize the resulting products and services.
About L2C Partners:
L2C Partners, founded in 2015 by Merle Gilmore, provides outsourced technology transfer and commercialization services in the pharma, bioscience and tech categories for educational institutions and research centers.
For more information about Lankenau Ventures, contact Lisa Packer, communications consultant, at lisa@root-strat.com or 215.460.8333.