The University of Chicago is partnering with a health care investment firm that has pledged up to $130 million to help turn the school’s research and discoveries into medications more quickly.
The university and Deerfield Management are partnering on the initiative, called Hyde Park Discovery. Deerfield will spend up to $130 million over the next 10 years, and offer its expertise to help advance the university’s discoveries, in hopes of bringing them to the health care market.
If the collaboration is successful in bringing new drugs or other therapies to market, the university and Deerfield would share in the financial upside, said Samir Mayekar, managing director of the university’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
The university has already seen its discoveries turn into real-life health care therapies. But the new partnership will help to speed that process, Mayekar said.
“This partnership with Deerfield will help us bring our commercialization efforts to the next level, especially in the life sciences field,” Mayekar said. “That is important, so that great science can help save lives.”
A joint steering committee made up of leaders from UChicago, the Polsky Center and Deerfield will evaluate and agree on which projects to back for accelerated advancement.
Deerfield, based in New York City, has embarked on a number of similar partnerships with other universities across the country and locally. In 2018, Deerfield announced a $65 million partnership with Northwestern University, and, in 2019, another $65 million initiative with University of Illinois Chicago.
Deerfield chooses which universities to partner with based on a number of factors, including their research funding from the National Institutes of Health, faculty, and filings for intellectual property, said Bill Slattery, a partner on the therapeutics team at Deerfield.
“University of Chicago stands in a very distinguished postion in terms of its … NIH funding, faculty members and discoveries,” Slattery said. “It is by far an institution that is noted for extraordinary minds passing through its doors.”
