St. Louis medical forum to focus on innovations, funding

ST. LOUIS -- About 200 leaders in science, academia and medicine are gathering in St. Louis this week for the TransMed Partnership forum to discuss the challenges of marketing medical innovations.

"When people start talking and sparking with each other, light bulbs go off," said Marcia Mellitz, president of St. Louis' Center for Emerging Technologies business incubator and an organizer of TransMed. "They start thinking of things differently than they did when they started ... and that's what we want to capture."

The broader goal of the conference, which started today and ends Tuesday, is for leaders across the industry to team up in their work and find new methods for commercialization, Mellitz said. In the end, organizers will publish a report identifying promising ideas and areas to pursue.

"We believe that all of these people together will be motivated to come up with the next steps" for policy change and innovation, said Lesa Mitchell, vice president for advancing innovations at the Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City-based not-for-profit, with $2 billion in assets devoted to promoting entrepreneurship and education. The Kauffman Foundation is a TransMed sponsor.

Whether in St. Louis, or leading biotech areas such as Boston and San Diego, participants share a struggle to more quickly and efficiently bring technologies to patients, she said.