The NIH Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) has signed a new Partnership Intermediary Agreement (PIA) with BioHealth Innovation (BHI), a new regional private-public partnership in Maryland focusing on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding. With this agreement, the NIH and FDA will now benefit from BHI’s assistance with evaluating the commercial potential of technologies and their collaboration with small businesses and educational institutions to make productive use of technologies from NIH and FDA intramural laboratories.

Under one of the first projects planned for the PIA, BHI will employ and place an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) within OTT to evaluate and identify licensing opportunities for intramural inventions in the areas of drugs, vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices from the intramural research programs of the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). An NIH EIR is an industry expert with scientific, entrepreneurial/managerial and financial experience who works with NIH to identify, evaluate and support the development of new start-up companies based upon technology license agreements from OTT.

"The NIH Office of Technology Transfer is excited by the opportunity to work with BHI as a way to accelerate the licensing and commercial development of inventive technologies coming from the NIH and FDA intramural research programs," said Mark Rohrbaugh, director of OTT. "We expect synergies particularly between the planned 'Entrepreneur-In-Residence' program fostered by BHI and the new 'Start-up Express License' that NIH launched late last year."

More details about BHI and its planned programs can be found at www.biohealthinnovation.org.