Universities have long been incubators of innovation, spearheading crucial research and kickstarting transformative ideas. But Washington University in St. Louis’s Olin Business School wants to take it to the next level, partnering with fellow innovators at WashU and in the community—along with corporations, nonprofit organizations, and policymakers—to help bring game-changing health-care solutions out of the lab and directly into the global marketplace.
In November 2024, Olin launched its new “Business of Health” initiative, designed to address complex challenges in the health-care industry. Olin recently co-hosted a half-day summit with The Atlantic titled “The Business of Health” to examine the ways in which academia and industry might partner to close the gap between medical discovery and real-world impact. “It takes a village to solve these problems,” says Doug Frantz, Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Commercialization at WashU.
In this conversation with Frantz, we delve into WashU’s impressive legacy, why the future of health care is dependent on burgeoning business expertise, and how other universities across the world can, like WashU, function as powerful catalysts for commercialization.
“The Business of Health” seeks to utilize business principles to help improve health-care systems and operations. Can you talk a little bit about why WashU’s initiative was created and why it’s so important to have the conversation around it today?
Doug Frantz
I think it’s pretty clear for most of us that the healthcare industry is one of the biggest economic drivers in the U.S. economy and, looking forward, will continue to be so. On top of that, health care is one of the biggest industries in the St. Louis region, anchored, obviously, by WashU. So it makes a lot of sense for Olin to leverage the opportunity to build this initiative across the entire university, including the School of Medicine and the School of Public Health, to drive it from a couple of different areas of innovation. It makes sense for us—as an institution, regionally, and across the country—to be able to think about training the next leaders in this area of the business of health.
When we think about the professionals at the forefront of healthcare, we may naturally think of physicians and other healthcare practitioners—but the future of healthcare also requires a broad and diverse array of business expertise. What types of leaders and companies are so crucial to these efforts, and why?
Doug Frantz
It’s a broad pipeline that goes from very early in the discovery and innovation phase, to basic science, to the pharmaceutical and biotech companies helping to translate those discoveries from a university setting into a tangible outcome at the bedside. On top of that, policymakers and leaders with expertise in the business elements of health have to be a big part of the equation as well. We need people at the forefront who understand what the current challenges in the health-care delivery system are, and who can drive those discussions from a public policy standpoint.
So it’s a culmination, I think, of expertise. We need people that understand how to operate and maximize the health-care system even at the earliest stages. We need people with a broad perspective from the public policy standpoint. And then, we obviously need people at the front lines who are sitting by the bedside, taking care of our patients, and driving the daily care that is so impactful for all of us. It’s a massive continuum that necessitates interdisciplinary collaboration.
What are some of the core ways that business principles can improve healthcare systems and operations, and help to drive new innovations in the healthcare space?
Doug Frantz
If you talk to any health-care provider across the globe, they’re all trying to prove efficiency. And that comes down to operational excellence and driving cost-effective decisions. I think all of us learned a very valuable lesson when COVID hit; the supply chain got completely disrupted, and we had to lean on very basic core business principles to figure out how to solve those problems in a real-time scenario. I think a lot of the operational components of a health-care system need to rope in that business acumen to figure out the best way not only to deliver health-care, but also health-care operations on a hospital basis.
And then on the innovation side of things, for the people who are at the very early stages of the pipeline—making discoveries in science or engineering that will drive innovation in health care—having that business perspective helps you understand your customer base and the market. Which, at the end of the day, is really what’s going to drive which innovations will be successful and which will not.
Having these core principle concepts that combine business with innovation is why I think the “Business of Health” initiative here at WashU is so important. I wish I’d been offered some of these business opportunities and classes as part of the curriculum when I was an undergraduate student!
WashU is a leader in medical innovation and commercialization. Can you talk about the university’s real-world impact on medical breakthroughs, and how it’s been able to bring these ideas from concept to marketplace?
Doug Frantz
This is where we shine, and we like to brag a little bit! With respect to medical breakthroughs at the School of Medicine here at WashU, you’re looking at one of the powerhouses. We invest around $1.2 billion annually into driving research and clinical outcomes as a part of our mission. In any given year, we run about 2,500 clinical trials. We rope in expertise from around 14,500 physicians across the entire health-care system. We have a massive amount of expertise, a massive amount of talent, and a volume of discovery that is just incredible. And we make sure that impact is felt outside the fences of WashU and within the St. Louis ecosystem.
We have this great advantage, because at a given table, I can sit down with a scientist from the School of Arts and Sciences; I can sit down with an engineer from the McKelvey School of Engineering; I can sit down with somebody with business acumen from the Olin Business School. I’ve got a clinician sitting at that table; I’ve got a physician scientist sitting at that table; I’ve got so many experts sitting at one table. This concept of collaboration really drives our innovation here to lead to new discoveries, like C2N Diagnostics’ new blood tests for Alzheimer’s disease, or our success story with Prognosia on using AI for early detection of breast cancer. We wake up every single day and that’s what drives us.
That cross-sector mentality, where all of us are sitting at the same table and we all kind of speak a different language, is all driven by patient care and trying to make an impact. I think that’s what’s special about what we do. I’ve only been here for eight months, but the thing that impresses me the most about WashU is that every single person that is sitting at that table is not afraid to tackle the toughest problems when it comes to human medicine, especially when it relates to brain health and neurodegeneration. We embrace challenges at WashU, and I’m so lucky to be here.
Looking to the future, what do you think a university’s role in shaping the future of health and business should be? What are some of the ways that WashU and Olin are doing this?
Doug Frantz
I think knowledge creation is core to the mission of any university, like WashU, that is really aligned with driving patient care at the same time as training our next generation of scientists, physicians, and business leaders. If we’re going to maintain—or even increase—our ability to impact health care down the road, universities are tasked with this huge mission of training the next generation of physicians and scientists. On top of that, we need people that are there to influence policymaking and drive innovation and entrepreneurship.
Across the university, we want to introduce our students to innovative concepts in the classroom and expose them to real-world applications while they are still in school. So it’s on us to really promote those activities, to create that culture on campus, so we don’t lose an opportunity for the next Alzheimer’s drug or the next diagnostic for ALS. These are things that we need to embrace across the entire ecosystem, and I think that’s where you’ll see a lot of impact moving forward from us.
The Atlantic and WashU recently held a half-day summit to explore how medical breakthroughs—especially in complex fields like neurological disease—can move from discovery to real-world impact at scale. Can you share some of the broad themes and topics that came out of this summit?
Doug Frantz
We discussed how to scale innovation in this space, especially as the population ages, and the role universities are going to have to play. We heard a lot about how universities are potentially reinventing themselves, aligning themselves to continue to make an impact in these areas.
The summit also focused on collaboration—not only cross-sector collaboration, between the private sector and public sector, but also with respect to cross-discipline collaboration, and how people in the business school and the med school and all these other disciplines are working together.
We’re really at a precipice at this time in our country when it comes to sustainable health care and how that’s going to be funded moving forward. So there was a lot of discussion around that, which then dovetailed into a bigger conversation around health-care disparities and how to get health care disseminated to the masses, especially in more rural areas. Those are some of the major themes that came out of the summit.
Is there anything else you’d like to add about the importance of closing the gap between discovery, implementation, and impact when it comes to healthcare, and universities’ role in facilitating that?
Doug Frantz
For us here at WashU in particular, the mission has always been—and always will be—to value teaching, research, and patient care. Our ability to form strategic partnerships, especially with our colleagues in the industry, is going to help us continue that mission, and to face the challenges and headwinds coming our way.
We’re proactively looking to partner with pharma companies, with biotech companies, with people in the health-care delivery systems; these are things going on at WashU, and I’m sure this is happening across multiple universities. For me, the most critical thing to help us close this gap is really figuring out how this public-private partnership, this academic-industry partnership, will help translate and catalyze innovation in health care and the business of health. That’s where we need to be.
