GE Healthcare launched an open innovation project healthymagination, under which GE and its venture partners will award up to $100 million to fund ideas that improve detection and treatment of breast cancer.
At the same time the company announced plans to spend $1 billion of its total R&D budget over the next five years to expand its cancer diagnostics and molecular imaging capabilities, and to develop improved technologies for the manufacture of biopharmaceuticals. This $1 billion R&D investment will cross all lines of GE Healthcare’s business.
The healthymagination project will look to external contributors to help GE identify and bring to market ideas that advance breast cancer diagnostics. The goal is to help health care professionals better understand tumours associated with triple negative cancer, a type of cancer that is less responsive to standard treatments and is typically more aggressive, as well as the molecular similarities between breast cancer and other solid tumours, improving early detection.
The Challenge, open immediately for entries at www.healthymagination.com/challenge, was launched in collaboration with the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Venrock, Mohr Davidow and MPM Capital.
Healthymagination mirrors GE’s open innovation project in energy, ecomagination.
Risa Stack, partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers and GE healthymagination Challenge judge said, "Based on our work in healthcare, we think that there is great opportunity to impact cancer care with new technology in the next 10 years. As we saw through the success of the ecomagination Challenge, innovation can be transformational and good ideas that drive change can come from anywhere. We look forward to once again partnering with GE on the healthymagination Challenge to help shape a new age in patient care."
Challenge entrants will be evaluated by a committee of representatives from GE and venture capital partner firms. A separate, independent judging panel that includes GE executives, venture capital partners and several leading healthcare specialists - such as former US FDA Commissioner and National Cancer Institute Director, Andrew Von Eschenbach; Professor of Surgery and Director of the University of Michigan Breast Care Center, Lisa Newman; and cancer medicine specialist and Imperial College London professor of cancer medicine, Justin Stebbing - will select the recipients of the $100,000 innovation seed grants.
von Eschenbach said scientific discovery and advances in technology have “induced a tipping point” in the understanding of cancer. “To design and deliver integrated solutions for individual patients, we can no longer work in silos. We must combine our assets for diagnosis and therapy, working in concert with partners across the private sector, government, NGOs and academia to create the right treatment for the right patient to achieve the right outcome, eliminating suffering and death from cancer,” he said.
GE is also investing in the development of a “super” database to consolidate clinical, pathology, therapy and outcomes data in one place, to enable analysis and further accelerate innovation. This super database will be available in collaboration with leading cancer research, NGO and government organisations.
More on the $100 million GE open innovation challenge to find and fund ideas to accelerate detection of breast cancer and enable more personalised treatment here.
To view the full terms and conditions, visit healthymagination.com/challenge. Winners will be announced in the first quarter of 2012.
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