InnoVital Systems Licenses Breathing Device to Cleveland Clinic

MedStar Health and the Cleveland Clinic have signed a deal with Beltsville, Md.-based InnoVital Systems to license patent rights for a medical device that helps patients with severe lung and neuromuscular diseases to breathe.

The deal comes three years after Columbia, Md.-headquartered MedStar and the Cleveland Clinic’s technology transfer arm unveiled its allianced aimed at commercializing medical innovation. Under the partnership, announced in January 2011, the division acts as a conduit between MedStar employees with viable intellectual property and Cleveland Clinic Innovations, the medical system’s 10-year-old technology transfer arm. By purchasing access to the Cleveland Clinic’s existing tech transfer infrastructure, MedStar officials hope they can short-circuit a long, costly process of creating a commercialization support shop from scratch.

InnoVital Systems has developed the InVent Diaphragm Assist Device, invented by William Krimsky, M.D., director of the Center for Interventional Pulmonology at MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center in Baltimore. The implanted device mechanically assists the diaphragm, the large muscle that separates the chest from the abdomen and controls breathing. The device, which MedStar and Cleveland Clinic describe as an implantable ventilator, would assist the diaphragm in drawing air into the lungs — similar to how pumps that support heart function and blood flow (called ventricular-assist devices) have helped patients with heart failure.

“One of the foundational principles behind the creation of the MedStar Institute for Innovation is that a tremendous amount of creative and intellectual capital exists throughout MedStar Health. The Healthcare Innovation Alliance that we formed with the Cleveland Clinic enables us to tap into the core of that energy and unleash it,” Dr. Mark S. Smith, director of MedStar Institute for Innovation, said in a statement. “This licensing of rights to the diaphragmatic assist device, an invention which has real potential to substantively improve the lives of innumerable patients, is confirmation that MedStar made the right bet.”