Inventive spirit
Cardiologist William Cohn will lead an innovation center in the Medical Center.
In Houston’s march toward capturing a spot as a national hotbed of bio-science invention, Johnson & Johnson Innovation will open a center next year dedicated completely to medical devices.
The Center for Device Innovation, scheduled to open near the Texas Medical Center’s main campus in the third quarter of 2017, will be part of an ongoing collaboration between the worldwide health care business and Houston’s medical center focusing on a seamless line from idea to market in one location.
Tapped to lead the ambitious project is internationally renowned cardiologist Dr. William Cohn, a proud Houstonian who pairs his somber charcoal suit with cowboy boots. Cohn, once profiled in The New Yorker, has not only worked with the best of the best in his field of heart surgery but has a curiosity and creativity that has lent itself to a series of his own medical inventions.
He sat down with the Chronicle to talk about his past, present and future as he prepares to embark on a new challenge. Here is an edited version of his comments:
Q: What set you on such a unique life path?
A: My parents moved here when I was 18 months old. I grew up in Houston, and Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley were the two most prominent heart surgeons in the world. My mom would always drive down Fannin and say that’s where DeBakey and Cooley work. In 1969 there was a famous event when Michael DeBakey, who had been developing this artificial heart, was in Washington, D.C., getting funding, and while he was out of town, Denton Cooley implanted it in a patient. My mom cut that article out and put it next to my cereal bowl. And I thought it was the coolest thing ever. My mom likes to think that’s what lit my fuse. I grew up thinking that DeBakey and Cooley were rock stars. Then it worked out that I got to go to medical school and do my five years of general surgery and two years of cardiac surgery with Michael DeBakey. So I was at Baylor College of Medicine for 11 years. And then I left Houston and went to Boston.
Q: How did that move influence your passion to keep talent in Houston?
A: DeBakey and Cooley and all these guys would come up with these ideas and actually do the experiments and create something that saved lives, but none of it actually stayed in Houston. I didn’t realize that at the time. I just knew that when Dr. DeBakey invented the artificial vascular graft, it was created in California. Or when Bud Frazier would work on a pump heart, they would develop it in Boston. I didn’t think much about it, and then I left here and went to Harvard, and there everything was startups. There was a lot of medical technology, and I realized Boston is a big hub for that. It got me wondering why it wasn’t like that in Houston. I guess it was because in Houston if you were entrepreneurial, you spent most of your time in the oil and gas sector or real estate.
Q: You call it a “one ZIP code” philosophy. Why is it important to follow through from idea to development in one place?
A: The most important thing is the patients get the technology faster and easier. Because if you have to take a technology and you come up with an idea and then you have to fly it to a lab to test it, and then you have to fly a bunch of surgeons or neurologists or obstetricians in from around the country to look at it, and then you go back and look at it some more, it makes the process less efficient and more resource-intensive. It takes longer to develop lifesaving technologies to help patients live better lives. If we can streamline that process, we can bring more stuff to the bedside.
Q: How did you become an inventor?
A: My debut as an innovator was in 1997. It was the first stabilizer that allowed you to do bypass surgery without stopping the heart. I had just finished training and gone to Boston. By my second year I was starting to get a little more confident, and I started thinking about innovation. Right about then we started hearing about surgeons in South America who were trying to do heart surgery without stopping the heart. They were reporting results that were actually better than using the heart-lung machine. Two surgeons in the United States had started doing it, and my boss said, “Why don’t you go and watch one of these guys do it?” So while they were operating on the beating heart, the assistant took a two-pronged fork and mashed it down on the surface of the heart while the surgeon tried to sew the two blood vessels together. These blood vessels are a little bit bigger than pencil lead, and they are very delicate, and if you’re not super gentle, they will tear. It was very stressful even watching it. Afterward I finally got up the courage to ask a question: Why doesn’t somebody make it so you could adjust the pressure just right and lock in place? The surgeon said he was sure someone is working on it. And a light bulb went on over my head.
Q: That became you?
A: On the plane ride back, my mind was racing. I went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of spoons and ladles and hammered them out and cut them up. I didn’t have a machine shop. I was living in an apartment at the time, and my wife had to vacuum up the metal shavings. The first ones I tried didn’t work, but after a couple weeks I got some that worked great. My boss said, “When’s your first case?” And I said you can’t take a cut-up spoon in the operating room, and he said you most certainly can. There’s a long history of surgeons using homemade tools.
Q: Where did the idea for the Center for Device Innovation come from?
A: From my friend Bruce Rosengard. Bruce is a heart surgeon I have known for 20 years or so. Almost exactly two years ago … I said, you know, I’m actually sort of thinking about a career shift. … So here were these two opportunities in California that would allow me to ramp up my innovative efforts, which has been the most meaningful part of my career. I love making stuff that helps patients. But I would have to move to California. And Bruce said: “If you’re going to do that, why don’t you do it for Johnson & Johnson? I bet we could make it so you could stay in Houston.” So for the next two years the job description of what we were trying to create and the idea for the CDI evolved.
Q: So how will the CDI help inventors?
A: Our new facility is strictly devices, and they are Johnson & Johnson devices. When you come into this new facility, you already have some arrangement where Johnson & Johnson has skin in the game. And since it is so device-centric, we’re going to have the manpower, the people and the equipment to make anything we can conceive of. We’re going to start out with a couple and maybe expand to have eight or 10. I’ve already identified projects that I am just straining at the bit to get started on.