Dear Open Innovation Challenge Community,

We are thrilled to announce today the winners of the first phase of GE healthymagination’s $100 million commitment to cancer.  Since September 2011 you have been a part of nearly 4,000 people engaged on the Challenge portal, submitting over 500 ideas and leaving 170 comments.  Thank you! 

Together we are seeking to identify and accelerate ideas that advance breast cancer early detection and diagnostics.  The five seed grant winners selected by a panel of judges, that included venture capital partners, GE executives, and several leading healthcare luminaries, are excellent examples of that commitment and we believe each especially merits the recognition of our award of $100,000. 

Today’s researchers face a difficult environment, and economic realities too often force difficult choices among promising ideas.  Mentoring, incubating and accelerating these early-stage ideas is a new approach for GE’s healthymagination, and we are committed to shining a spotlight on early-stage work from our innovation challenges so that this work continues and hopefully accelerates in new ways through our awards and future partnerships.    

Numerous other challenges will follow to fund advances that we hope will empower doctors and patients and enable more personalized treatment for women worldwide.  We continue to evaluate all these ideas and others for equity investments.  As this new and exciting GE approach evolves, we look forward to announcing more open innovation challenges and future equity investments that help innovators like you improve their chances of creating sustainable businesses.   We promise to contact you when we announce our next round of open innovation challenges, which will also be available and on our website at www.healthymagination.com

Now allow us to introduce the seed winners of the healthymagination Innovation Challenge:    

• MyCancerGenome- Personalized Approach to Triple Negative Breast Cancer: Vanderbilt University is developing MyCancerGenome, a free online cancer medicine resource and decision-making tool for physicians, patients, caregivers and researchers. It provides up-to-date information on what mutations make breast cancer grow and related treatment implications, including available genome-directed clinical trials for triple negative breast cancer.

• Creating Safer & Stronger Breast Implants with Cancer-fighting and Healing Properties:  The University of Akron is developing new materials for breast reconstruction to transform tissue expanders and implants into cancer-fighting and healing devices. Using coatings embedded with pharmaceutical agents the new devices is expected to help fight infection, reduce inflammation, and possibly even target and destroy stray cancer cells.

• Identifying a Predisposition to Cancer Spread: Moffitt Cancer Center is working to understand the genetic "modifier" genes and their role in predisposition to the spread of cancer to other parts of the body following cancer onset.  This research could form the basis of diagnostic testing for genes that place a patient at disproportionate risk for cancer spread and guide aggressiveness of treatment.

• Saving Lives in Developing Countries: For developing countries such as Uganda, breast ultrasound holds promise in identifying cancers in young women with palpable lumps. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI) in Kampala are establishing a breast cancer screening program where women will receive education about breast cancer and those with symptoms will be offered clinical breast exam and breast ultrasound. Women with suspicious lumps will be referred to the UCI for tissue sampling and, if malignancy is diagnosed, treatment.

• Moving to Personalized Therapy for Triple Negative Breast Cancer. Researchers at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center have demonstrated that gene expression analysis reveals at least six distinct disease subtypes for triple negative breast cancer that likely respond differently to chemotherapy. Using this discovery, the Center is designing clinical trials with targeted therapy for select subtypes which will soon be offered to patients.

Alan Gilbert,

Director, Healthymagination

Dear Open Innovation Challenge Community,

Happy New Year!  We at GE’s healthymagination wanted to let you know we’re getting closer to making decisions about open innovation seed grant awards.  I am pleased to update each of our challenge ideators on our progress.   

As I reported before the end of 2011, you and your fellow submitters provided almost 600 ideas from 46 countries for our consideration.   These ideas represented enormous economic, social, and clinical significance.  Each of you represent exciting entrepreneurs in this space and deserve enormous respect and gratitude for being out there going for it!  We are excited about being a part of your development.    

Our shared focus on empowering breast cancer patients and their doctors and improving the continuum of care will not stop when we announce winners.  We are exploring ways to have effective relationships, pilot innovator accelerators, and fund other models to work with selected entrants who are not even chosen as grant winners.  As we have said before -- the real strength of our initiative and investment is the potential for creating shared value through new ideas and opportunities like yours.  Stay tuned for some exciting new ideas for continued collaboration.   

Our internal GE experts, independent external expert judges, and venture capital partners, are narrowing down the ideas submitted to the best and most exciting.   It is a hard job, but we plan to reach a decision on five seed grant awards of $100,000 each in the coming weeks.  Each of you will be notified of our decision and at that time we will provide information on our winners.   Announcements around possible equity investment and collaboration with GE and our venture capital partners will come later – and those of you being considered will be notified separately for additional discussions.  Any news around venture capital will be jointly announced by GE and our venture capital partners.   

Thanks again for your interest and for submitting your idea to our challenge.  There are additional phases and exciting opportunities on the horizon in 2012 – and we want to continue our relationship with you.   If you have any comments, questions, or concerns or would like to discuss any issue of mutual concern do not hesitate to contact us at healthy.challenge@ge.com.  

Alan Gilbert
Director, healthymagination

Dear Open Innovation Challenge Community,

Recently, we concluded phase one of our $100M healthymagination Open Innovation Challenge to accelerate detection and more personalized diagnostics for breast cancer. On behalf of GE and healthymagination, we are pleased you chose to submit your idea as part of this effort.

By joining our Challenge, you have become a part of a new digital ecosystem of breast cancer innovators that has enormous economic, social, and clinical significance. You are among more than 225 institutions, 150 for-profit companies, non-profits, individuals, and students who submitted an idea. You are from over 40 different countries. What ties us all together, however, is our shared focus on empowering breast cancer patients and their physicians and improving the continuum of care. Indeed, the real strength of our initiative and investment is the potential for creating shared value through new ideas and opportunities like yours.

We are hard at work with our judges and venture capital partners, evaluating all the ideas submitted. The quality of submissions is high, and we are devoting the time and effort needed to thoroughly evaluate every idea and objectively reach a decision on five seed grant awards of $100,000 each. It is our desire to announce winners of these awards early in the coming year. Investment and collaboration decisions by GE and our venture capital partners will take additional time, and more work and details from those of you selected. So stay tuned.

Finally, 2012 holds even greater promise! We will announce the second phase of our Challenge when we announce seed grant awards from phase one; and more challenges will follow throughout the year. Regardless of our decisions in phase one or subsequent phases, healthymagination's overriding goal is to drive positive change through real engagement and connections. We want to stay engaged with you and the strong international network of cancer researchers and entrepreneurs, regardless of winners. Together, we can create a new generation of solutions for breast cancer patients worldwide.

Thank you for the effort and trust you placed in GE in submitting your idea to our challenge. If you have any comments, questions, or concerns or would like to discuss any issue of mutual concern do not hesitate to contact us at healthy.challenge@ge.com.

Alan Gilbert
Healthymagination Challenge Team
GE Corporate

Phase one of GE’s $100 million healthymagination Challenge has officially closed (as of November 20th).  This open innovation call-to-action was launched on September 15th as part of GE’s larger commitment to cancer, starting with breast cancer. During phase one, over 4,000 people engaged on the Challenge portal. They collectively submitted over 500 ideas to advance breast cancer diagnostics and left 170 comments.  Ideas were submitted from 40 countries with more than half generated outside of the US.  A word of thanks to all of the innovators who submitted ideas, added their support or expressed their comments.

We launched this open innovation Challenge because we believe that the greatest cancer breakthroughs will come through partnership and collaboration.  I’m pleased to share that the quality of ideas submitted during phase one was exceptional.  By identifying and funding the very best ideas, as determined by our judges and venture capital partners, we hope that together, we will bring game-changing technologies to patients faster. 

To give you a flavor for the submitted ideas, here are two highlights:

• Development of magnetic nanocarriers (received the most support): This idea suggests binding chemotherapy drugs to magnetic nanoparticles to enable more effective drug delivery and reduce the toxicity of existing chemotherapy methods.  

• Quantum Dot Breast Cancer Screening Bra (received the most comments): This is an idea for a breast cancer screening device that is similar to a typical sports bra with a special lining that changes colors to detect potential malignant cells based on temperature.   

We are currently reviewing all submitted ideas and plan to announce winners in the first quarter of 2012 along with the next phase of the Challenge.  Again, thank you to everyone who has engaged in the Challenge community.  We look forward to continuing this dialogue in 2012. 

Mike Barber, VP healthymagination

To all innovators

GE, VC partners and judges are excited to learn about your ideas and technologies. We’ve received several questions about broadly sharing your intellectual property (IP). To help you in participating in the healthymagination challenge, this post is to guide you as you construct your submission.  

In short, you keep all rights to your IP. Please structure your information to explain and support the feasibility of your idea or innovation in a way that's comfortable for you under the terms linked here. The judges can ask you follow-up questions that you can choose to answer in a way that continues to protect your IP.  If there is interest in an equity investment, GE and/or VC partners will enter a non-disclosure agreement with you before discussing more deeply and exploring an equity investment.

I hope this clarification encourages you to share your solutions. You inspire us by all you are doing to accelerate innovation for breast cancer!

Trajan Bayly
Director healthymagination