Illustration by Rob Hadley for Cure
Overview
How the Cure Innovation Index evaluates whether institutions can move scientific discoveries to market.
Research capabilities drive discovery, and entrepreneurial readiness shapes whether researchers think beyond the lab. Market translation is where those efforts are tested: it measures how successfully an institution converts scientific discoveries into products, therapies, and companies that reach people.
Translation has become central to the mission of research institutions. Yet producing discoveries and getting them to market are two different things, and most institutions are far better at the first than the second.
Most of that work runs through the technology transfer office. The Cure Innovation Index looks at whether a tech transfer office (TTO) has enough experienced licensing professionals on staff and how productively they convert research into patents. Commercialization requires specialized expertise that most researchers don't have and shouldn't need to acquire on their own, which makes the size and experience of the licensing team a meaningful signal. Staffing alone doesn't capture performance, though. Two offices with similar budgets can produce very different output depending on how they're organized and how closely they work with faculty, which is why the Index also evaluates patent activity relative to the size of the licensing team.
Getting a patent filed is one thing, but getting the underlying science into the hands of someone who can build on it is another. The Index tracks whether an institution's research is informing commercial development by looking at how often its publications are cited in patent filings, and it considers whether an institution holds an NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award, which provides both funding and infrastructure for moving research toward clinical application.
None of that matters much without industry partners willing to invest. The Index measures how actively faculty collaborate with the private sector through the share of publications that include an industry co-author, a proxy for sustained working relationships rather than one-off consulting. Because partnerships tend to flow toward institutions that are known quantities, reputation plays a role too. The Cure Innovation Index surveyed more than 100 venture capitalists, pharmaceutical executives, and healthcare professionals and asked them to name the institutions they most preferred to work with, and the share of nominations an institution received became part of its market translation score.
"Academic institutions can only take innovations so far without engaging with a commercial partner, whether that is an early-stage venture capital, or an established pharmaceutical company," said Irene Abrams, Senior Vice President of Research Innovation at Boston Children's Hospital. "Those partnerships are the key to successful translation."
Abrams noted that those partnerships depend on meaningful de-risking at the academic level. A company is far more likely to license a technology when it comes with strong intellectual property and an engaged researcher willing to continue working on its development. The quality of the relationship between a TTO and industry often determines whether a promising discovery finds a commercial path or stalls.
"Technology transfer offices can be a central part of the success of a university's entrepreneurship efforts," said Victor Dzau, MD, PhD, President of the National Academy of Medicine. "They must understand the research and the entrepreneurial world and establish relationships with the commercial side."
That responsibility, Dzau added, sometimes extends beyond how deals benefit a single institution, to how new drugs, technologies, and intellectual property can impact U.S. society.
With those measures in mind, here are the 20 institutions that scored highest in market translation.
Top Universities
Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stanford University
University of California, San Diego
University of California, San Francisco
Johns Hopkins University
Duke University
University of Pennsylvania
California Institute of Technology
University of Washington, Seattle
