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Discipline
Science
Fusion students are given a working depth in the scientific domain underlying the current program. Where possible, Ph.D. students are drawn from a program whose live invention disclosures can be selected for team use.
We believe a functional understanding of the science underlying a technological innovation is critical for the business and legal professionals attempting to identify, understand, and cultivate its value. Without it, they are valuing a story about a technology.
The scientist on the team develops an understanding of the application, value, and strategy needed to deliver good science to the people who will use it, which a laboratory does not supply on its own.
Each cycle is anchored by a researcher at the top of the field, teaching it directly to students who are not specialists in it. That has meant Joseph Nadeau on human genomics, J. Thomas Mortimer on nerve stimulation, and P. Hunter Peckham on neural prosthesis platforms.
Now
Two domains, running in parallel
This cycle the program carries two technology focuses at once, one in the School of Medicine and one in the Case School of Engineering. The scientific substance differs entirely and the analytical method is the same in both.
Regenerative Medicine
Driven in large part by our partnership with the M.S. in Regenerative Medicine and Entrepreneurship program at the National Center for Regenerative Medicine. Working with NCRM researchers, clinicians, industry experts, and entrepreneurs, teams evaluate the commercial potential of work in the field.
Subject inventions include delivery systems, therapies, and supporting technologies. The domain's constraints are taught directly: cell-therapy manufacturing and the potency assays that decide batch consistency, single-arm trial design judged against historical controls, and the reimbursement mechanics that determine whether an approved therapy reaches a patient.
- School
- School of Medicine
- Sequence
- Full year, fall through spring
Neuromodulation
Northern Ohio holds unusual depth in this field: research across the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, Case Western Reserve, the Cleveland Functional Electrical Stimulation Center, and the Advanced Platform Technology Center, together with companies built on that work, among them Synapse Biomedical, Neuros Medical, and NDI Medical.
Its commercialization problems are hard. Many discoveries concern the therapeutic effect of stimulating a precise anatomical target while offering little patentable ground around the device, the leads and pulse generators, or the system dynamics required for a marketable product. Few innovations arrive as an integrated product, and the path to market for an invasive device runs through regulatory review that cannot begin without early evidence of safety and efficacy.
- School
- Case School of Engineering
- Concentration
- Engineering, Innovation Management & Leadership
- Prior cycles
- 2011–12 · 2013–14 · 2014–15
The record
Technology focus areas since 2009
Each entry was a full cycle: a scientific lead who taught the field, live disclosures drawn from it, and student teams who had to reach a defensible commercial position by the end of the year.
A program that worked only one field would be teaching that field. Genomics, neural interfaces, energy systems, water treatment, and cell therapy share almost no scientific ground and few commercial mechanics. What survives the move between them is the method, which is what the program teaches.
How a domain gets chosen
There must be research depth within reach, meaning someone at the top of the field willing to teach it to students who are not specialists. There must be live invention disclosures that have not yet been evaluated. And the domain must pose commercialization problems that are hard in an instructive way.
A field where the path to market is well-trodden teaches little. Neuromodulation qualifies because the IP frequently sits apart from the product. Regenerative medicine qualifies because manufacturing consistency and reimbursement can defeat a therapy that works.