Discovery to Impact at The University of Texas at Austin has launched a venture studio aimed at building startups from the ground up to solve some of the world's most pressing challenges. UT's new venture studio will bring next-generation technology to market and advance scientific breakthroughs in sectors with significant societal impact, starting with medical digital twins to shape the future of modern health care.
"We're creating a new systematic process for launching startups out of UT's research enterprise that brings the right infrastructure, resources and expertise together to enable faster innovation and product development," said Mark Arnold, associate vice president of Discovery to Impact and managing director of Longhorn Ventures at UT. "It starts by focusing on a real-world need and then creates ventures with a supportive ecosystem around them that solves for that need with products and solutions that benefit our local, state and national economies and society at large."
Medical digital twins are dynamic, data-driven virtual replicas of a patient's body or organs. They enable doctors to examine a person's physiology and anatomy with greater precision, run noninvasive tests or stimulations on the model, and predict how the body might respond to specific treatments before performing them. Medical digital twins allow physicians to focus on the individual patient rather than relying on current methods of generalized, average-based care.
"The market for computational medicine with the use of AI-enabled digital twin technology has the potential to revolutionize personalized patient care and impact how we treat some of the most prevalent medical diseases of our time, like heart disease, dementia and cancer," said Charles "Charley" Taylor, professor of internal medicine at UT's Dell Medical School and the W.A. "Tex" Moncrief Jr. chair in computational medicine at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. UT's first venture will be guided by Taylor, who is an internationally recognized leader in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and digital twin technology and the co-founder of AI health care company Heartflow Inc. (NASADQ: HTFL).
The venture studio works by identifying a market need, then pulling together full-time entrepreneurs alongside University researchers to discover promising technologies that validate the market opportunity. Viable solutions are further tested and turned into ventures with strong value propositions, product-market fit, early-adopter customers, and exit strategies to attract investment and launch from the University. The result is scalable ventures with less risk and faster time-to-market than traditional startups typically have.
"As a public university, it is important that we build public trust by maximizing the return on academic research investments. The venture studio model rigorously validates technology and market fit to ensure that public investments in research are efficiently translated into real-world solutions," added Arnold.
Translating medical breakthroughs into Food and Drug Administration-cleared, reimbursed, and widely adopted clinical services is especially difficult, time consuming, and expensive. UT's venture model for health care innovation with digital twins is unique given its shared software infrastructure and services model with dedicated resources including compliance, legal, and HR support. This reduces operational costs and enables multiple vertical applications and rapid startup formation.
Health care represents the initial market sector that UT's venture studio will build around, with other market sectors to follow. Ventures will benefit from UT's leadership in computational medicine and digital twin research, clinical resources at its emerging medical center, top-ranked entrepreneurship programs, and access to capital through the $10 million UT Seed Fund. As the venture studio scales up, it will continue to leverage UT's interdisciplinary strengths in artificial intelligence, advanced semiconductor science and engineering, materials science, and robotics.
"Through startup creation, commercial collaborations, and other pathways to market, Discovery to Impact is accelerating the translation of academic research and breakthrough ideas into products and businesses that can change the world," said Arnold.
