Healthcare company-building profile
Biodesign Innovation Fellowship, Stanford Mussallem Center for Biodesign
Stanford Medicine / Stanford Health Care
Source-based profile
Program at a Glance
- Program type
- Accelerator
- Program category
- Health system accelerator
- Organization
- Stanford Medicine / Stanford Health Care
- Organization type
- Hospital or health system
- Location
- Stanford, California
- Company stage served
- Not publicly documented
- Cohort or participation model
- Not publicly documented
- Investment or funding offered
- Not publicly documented
- Published investment terms
- Not publicly documented
- Equity or fee model
- Not publicly documented
- Clinical or hospital connection
- Yes
- Application status
- Active
- Founded
- 2001
Public description
About the program
The Stanford Mussallem Center for Biodesign teaches and applies a need-driven process for identifying unmet health needs, inventing technologies to address them, and moving those solutions toward patients. Its signature offering is the Biodesign Innovation Fellowship, a 10-month immersion in which multidisciplinary fellows embed in clinical settings to identify important health needs, invent health technologies, and prepare implementation through startups, corporations, or other channels. The center trains more than 500 fellows, students, faculty, and executives per year and has exported the model through Singapore-Stanford Biodesign, Japan Biodesign, and an East Africa partnership, plus the widely used textbook Biodesign: The Process of Innovating Medical Technologies. Focus areas span medical devices, diagnostics, digital health, and therapeutics, and a Policy Program launched in 2023 addresses regulatory and reimbursement pathways. The center engages outside companies primarily through corporate sponsorship of the fellowship and by spinning fellow projects out into venture-backed startups.
What the program publicly emphasizes
Focus areas and features
- Category: Health system accelerator
Publicly documented people and network
Program leadership and alumni
- Program leader
- Josh Makower, MD — Director, Stanford Mussallem Center for Biodesign; Professor of Medicine and Bioengineering
- Notable alumni named in public materials
- 58 companies launched from technologies initiated at Biodesign (57 as of June 2024); more than 22 million patients helped by Biodesign-originated products (13+ million as of June 2024); more than $280 million raised by Biodesign-founded companies as of 2016; named spinouts include Acumen Medical (first company from a fellowship team, 2002), iRhythm (2006, which had reached 400,000 patients by 2016), Consure Medical (2012) and Eclipse Regenesis; over 500 fellows, students, faculty and executives trained per year; first textbook sold 10,000+ copies worldwide; renamed the Mussallem Center in September 2024 following a gift from Linda and Mike Mussallem (amount not disclosed), after being named the Byers Center in 2016 following a gift from Brook Byers; Health technologies developed by Biodesign trainees have helped more than 22 million patients; alumni have founded numerous medical device and digital health companies; program founded by Paul Yock, MD (now Director Emeritus) roughly two decades ago and renamed the Mussallem Center in 2024; dedicated directors for Innovation Fellowship (Dan Azagury), Digital Health & AI (Oliver Aalami), Biotechnology (Michael Ackermann) and global programs
Sources
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