The Brigham Innovation Hub was created for just this reason – to give BWH employees a way to take their most innovative thoughts from ideation to fruition. Acting as part incubator, part advisory board and part events office, the Brigham Innovation Hub was designed to connect smart clinicians like Abdulnour to business and engineering resources.

“We work at the early stage of clinician ideas,” Pothik Chatterjee, Manager of Innovation Strategy and Ventures for the Brigham Innovation Hub, says. “We assess the pain points, look at how they became inspired, then concretize those milestones to accelerate ideas into commercialization.”

Another success story from the Brigham Innovation Hub is Sophia Koo, a BWH infectious disease physician who wanted to develop a technology that could look at a patient’s breath and determine disease. Koo was able to acquire NIH funding to prove that a device like this could work. She collaborated with Draper Laboratory to develop a prototype of the breathalyzer, too, but then she came to the Brigham Innovation Hub’s director, Lesley Solomon, to ask for advice. What should she do next?

What followed is now a common occurrence at the Brigham Innovation Hub: Solomon advised Koo about business opportunities, direction and bringing her product to patients faster. Now Koo has her own company and she continues to work on the device (which she hopes can be used for 10 different infectious diseases with the burgeoning potential of identifying Pneumonia, too).

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