Building an innovation system for serial exits
- publish258
- Aug 21
- 4 min read
Medtech entrepreneur, Ghassan Kassab, who sold his first invention for over $30 million, is creating an innovation system that has so far produced four licences for medtech majors, six spin-offs and multiple IP options for future deals. Juergen Graner reports
Juergen Graner
Most university professors with an endowed chair who invent a new technology and sell it for more than $30 million in their late forties would likely consider early retirement. Not so, Dr Ghassan Kassab. He left academia, using the money to build an innovation system that continues to bring new inventions to market to improve the health of patients globally.
Ghassan was a born fighter. He grew up in Iraq as the son of a nurse with a father that passed away at the age of three, who came with his family to the United States at the age of twelve, having a fresh start in a new country with a new language and new surroundings. He did not go to a prestigious high school, but he understood that if he could advance his knowledge, he might be able to achieve great things. Ghassan excelled in his studies and received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, his master’s degree in engineering sciences and finished strong with a PhD in bioengineering (summa cum laude), all from UCSD (University of California, San Diego), one of the top schools for bioengineering. Besides training his mind, he also trained his body and earned a fifth-degree black belt in Shorinji Kempo.
After his studies Ghassan pursued an academic career that spanned over 20 years, starting from UCSD, then UCI (University of California, Irvine), leading to an endowed chair position at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indiana. During the latter part of his academic career Ghassan invented a new technology that helps clinicians to find the correct pathway towards the heart with a simple electrical signal. Since he could not find anyone to fund his new invention, he invested himself into the development of the prototype and secured it with a strong patent portfolio. Although he never took it through clinical trials, a company acquired his early-stage technology for over $30 million, providing him with a 30-times return on his investment. Instead of retirement, Ghassan decided to use those funds to change his career from academia to entrepreneur at the age of 48.
During his academic career in Indiana, Ghassan had founded 3DT Holdings in 2006, which was the first cornerstone of his innovation system. Initially the primary function of this company was to act as an IP holding to secure Ghassan’s personal inventions. In 2014, Ghassan left his academic career to fully follow his entrepreneurial drive and moved to California. There he established the second cornerstone of his innovation system, CALMI (California Medical Innovations Institute), a non-profit organisation. CALMI provides the research foundation and is focused on the primary interests of Ghassan, which are cardiovascular and gastroenterology applications. As a non-profit organisation, it can tap into a variety of grant options that a for-profit cannot. From the beginning, it has been important to Ghassan to ensure that research at CALMI focuses on medical technologies that have a clear commercialisation pathway to benefit patients globally, something that is not necessarily common in an academic environment.
Today 3DT has evolved and became a fully fledged technology incubator, taking the foundations created at CALMI and developing those into actual products that can be taken all the way through approval at the US regulator, the FDA, and get them ready for market. While 3DT has its own core development team, including engineers, each promising technology is put into a separate legal entity that can tap into all necessary resources. Each technology has its own path to commercialisation without sacrificing the know-how it has acquired through the ecosystem. It works both for Ghassan, as tribal knowledge can be kept and used for additional projects without having to rebuild a team, and for potential acquirers, who do not have to take over a development team that is likely no longer needed, since the products are already FDA approved and ready to market. 3DT is different from other incubators, as it only incubates internal projects, although on occasion it offers its capabilities to friendly partners from the larger network of 3DT.
While advancing technologies in 3DT, Ghassan realised that a third cornerstone was needed to efficiently bring products to a market-ready state. He therefore established Acculab Lifesciences, which is a contract research organisation (CRO) that provides pre-clinical services, including GLP-based studies. It became obvious that existing CROs were cumbersome as partners. Therefore AccuLab was established as a highly efficient and flexible organisation that can provide the needed services faster and at a more competitive price to 3DT’s ventures. While initially the intention was to provide services only to 3DT companies, later on it was decided that those pre-clinical services would be offered to third parties at large, whether to early-stage ventures in medical devices and biotech or to larger companies.
The whole innovation system that Ghassan has built, combining engines for research (CALMI) and for development in the form of an incubator (3DT) and a pre-clinical CRO (Acculab), allows him to continuously develop new technologies and get them ready for patients’ bedside. Currently 3DT has four exclusive licenses with major medical device corporations and six spin-offs that are advancing technologies with the goal of making serial exists. Profits generated from Acculab’s offer to third parties combined with 3DT’s licensing income and sale of its spin-offs are put back into the innovation system and, together with the NIH grants obtained from Small Business Innovation Research through 3DT, provide a sustainable model to continuously bring new medical technologies to the market.
From the start, patents have played an integral part in the commercial success of this innovation system. The initial sale of Ghassan’s technology for over $30 million before clinical trials would simply not have been possible without them. Also exclusive licensing deals and company exits of the spin-off ventures require a strong IP portfolio. 3DT therefore not only has an internal IP function, it also regularly hires development engineers and scientists to invent around the patents, which in turn results in additional patents for 3DT. Ghassan himself has over 300 issued and pending patents in his name, more than many medium-sized companies.
• 'Building an innovation system for serial exists', an article by Juergen Graner, first appeared in Managing Intellectual Property Today, 2025 edition, published by Novaro, ISBN: 978-1-0685644-1-3. See here for further details.
