Changes

The University of Pittsburgh is a city campus complete with a 4-year accredited undergraduate program, which is complemented by numerous prestigious graduate programs such as the School of Medicine, School of Law, School of Pharmacy, and School of Business.  The University of Pittsburgh received $759 million dollars 2013 to fund its various research endeavors.  These research dollars have cultivated an environment that has fostered the growth of an incredibly young yet impressive entrepreneurial landscape.  Pitt is a giant in life science innovation, partnering its engineering and business programs with the international conglomerate UPMC has yielded a plethora medical device inventions and innovations in addition to numerous patents, start-ups, and licensing opportunities.  This success is trickling down through the ranks allowing students to become instrumental in large entrepreneurial pursuits.  Programs such as the Coulter Program and CMI fund medical innovation and are beginning to recognize the untapped potential of undergraduate innovators.  Through special project funds and micro grants these programs are giving students a chance to contribute to Pitt’s entrepreneurial success.  Undergraduate funding is an incredibly new standard for our entrepreneurial faculty and the overwhelming success of the pilot groups of undergraduate teams has ensured the sustainability of undergraduate funding for years to come.

Since 1996 Pitt has seen 98 start-up companies emerge, nine of which began in 2013. Many of these start-up companies emerge from life science research conducted by faculty members at Pitt. The faculty research is often funded by large government grants such as the NIH or NSF. However, that funding does not provide a viable means for launching a potential business from a research facility. The University has turned to Coulter program and CMI to facilitate the transition of these ideas to the marketplace. The University of Pittsburgh received $3.54 million from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation in 2011 to fund translational research to be supplemented by $1.5 million dollars from the schools of Medicine and Engineering respectively. The grant covers five years of funding and was awarded to only six universities nationally. The goal of the Coulter program grant is to accelerate the introduction of new technologies to address current clinical deficiencies. CMI (Center for Medical Innovation) is an initiative that is similar to the Coulter program however, is Pitt-specific. CMI was started through the Coulter initiative and is intended to be the perpetual seeding program after the Coulter grant has finished. With these programs Pitt faculty has been overwhelming successful in moving their innovative technologies into the marketplace.