Collaborations

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The OHSU Collaborations and Entrepreneurship team builds high impact and efficient partnerships synergizing efforts with our colleagues at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute and the OHSU School of Medicine. This includes sourcing new potential partnerships, building collaborations and managing established alliances, with an eye towards growing alliances even further. OHSU works with all kinds of partners: government agencies, corporations, academic institutions, startups, and non-profits. We serve as the glue that brings internal and external stakeholders together, in order to drive innovation and technology development.  

Collaborations are a critical component of carrying out OHSU’s mission, and the OHSU  commercialization network aspires to develop strategic partnerships to improve care for our  communities within the region and beyond.  

Our partnering strategy is guided by four priorities:

  • Access to new tools, resources and know-how  
  • New grant funding opportunities, awarded jointly with partners  
  • Educational opportunities for our community  
  • Improvements to patient care 

Interested in exploring a collaboration?

OHSU members and external interested parties can send us a message below, and we will get in touch with you shortly.

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Multi-front collaboration with GE Healthcare

OHSU’s longstanding partnership with GE Healthcare in cardiovascular research, imaging and big data have sparked important innovations, leading to several high-profile publications describing how this partnership has bridged the knowledge gaps of many clinical challenges with unmet needs.

Most recently, a collaborative project headed by Jonathan Lindner, M.D., led to a publication in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) reporting the first in-human echocardiographic molecular imaging study. This publication was named among the top 10 most talked about articles from 2021 by JACC. Following on this, OHSU will be the first hospital in the Pacific Northwest equipped with GE Healthcare’s PET/MRI instrument.  

In 2017, OHSU partnered with GE Healthcare to launch OHSU Mission Control, a tool that monitors and analyzes bed capacity and patient flow. Mission Control improved patient care operations and later became the backbone of the Oregon state-wide COVID Capacity Center. When the pandemic began, the two organizations created the first virtual intensive care unit, or VICU, in Oregon. In coordination with OHSU’s Mission Control, VICU telemedicine brought access to critical care specialists across the state and helped keep patients with critical care needs in their local communities.  

In May 2021, OHSU and GE Healthcare renewed their Comprehensive Research Agreement for an additional five years, allowing the organizations to continue combining their expertise to advance research, accelerate delivery of quality care and improve patient outcomes. 

AstraZeneca

The OHSU Knight Cancer Institute is one of nine institutions worldwide, and just one of three in the United States, that is part of AstraZeneca’s Partner of Choice Network in precision oncology. With the Partner of Choice Network, AstraZeneca is bringing together the world’s foremost oncology medical centers to apply collective brainpower in expediting research in some of the hardest-to-treat cancers. Each site brings strong translational research capabilities and a desire to change the clinical paradigm through application of innovative translational science to clinical research. The Knight Cancer Institute was selected specifically for its strengths in early detection, the immune microenvironment, and its pioneering SMMART precision oncology platform.

Ionis Pharmaceuticals Inc.

OHSU’s collaboration with Ionis Pharmaceuticals features a drug co-development program using Ionis' proprietary antisense technology against novel targets in hematologic malignancies proposed by scientists from the Knight Cancer Institute. This partnership aims to accelerate the process of bringing novel drugs to patients with leukemia who currently have limited treatment options. Through this agreement, faculty at the Knight Cancer Institute are using new cutting-edge technology and gaining hands-on experience with the pharmaceutical drug development process. 

BridgeBio

OHSU signed a Master Collaboration Agreement with BridgeBío Pharma in January 2021. BridgeBio was founded in 2015 primarily to advance single-asset academic technologies through preclinical, clinical and ultimately commercial development. This partnership builds on five years of informal collaborations between the two organizations.  Under the three-year agreement, the BridgeBio team will work closely with OHSU scientists and investigators to advance potential medicines for patients with genetically driven conditions, including cancers. Several early-stage discussions have taken place across a variety of diseases. This collaboration has the potential to provide funding, resources and educational opportunities around drug development to our community, as well as advancing new drugs for unmet needs.

Pacific Northwest Biomedical Innovation Co-laboratory

OHSU and PNNL are improving their collaborative research environment through the OHSU-PNNL Pacific Northwest Biomedical Innovation Co-laboratory, or PMedIC. PMedIC will enhance researcher and trainee access to technologies, expertise and opportunities to advance the science of precision medicine. This expanded collaboration builds on previous joint efforts such as the OHSU-PNNL Northwest Co-Laboratory for Integrated ‘Omics.

Oregon Health and Science University is Oregon's only academic health center and was ranked as the #1 hospital in Oregon by U.S. News & World Report in 2021 and is Oregon's biggest employer. OHSU has a thriving research community, with an estimated $586.45 million in research grant awards and 100 new technology disclosures in 2021.

Major disease research areas include:

  • Cancer
  • Immunology/Infectious Diseases
  • Neurological Diseases
  • Child Health & Development
  • Cardiovascular Diseases
  • Drug/Alcohol Abuse
  • Metabolic Diseases & Diabetes
  • Rare Diseases
  • Reproductive Diseases
  • Ophthalmology 
  • Aging

Major innovations at OHSU span multiple research and disease areas. OHSU researchers:

  • Pioneered targeted cancer medicine.
  • Developed a vaccine candidate for HIV.
  • Showed that a gene-editing tool, CRISPR, can be used to repair a deadly genetic mutation in human embryos.
  • Engineered a material that replicates human bone tissue which creates opportunity to explore cancer initiation, metastasis and bone healing.
  • Created embryonic stem cells from skin cells to treat various diseases.
  • Developed the first West Nile vaccine to be tested in humans.
  • Created the first successful artificial heart valve.
  • Pioneered genetic therapies for treating the eye.
  • Revealed the human serotonin transporter's structure.

Research and Innovation

As the state’s only academic health center, OHSU’s breakthrough research leads to new cures, new standards of care, and a better understanding of the basic science that drives biomedical discovery. 

Research news and events

School of Medicine departments, centers and institutes

The OHSU School of Medicine is a vibrant community of educators, students, scientists, clinician and others working side-by-side to heal, teach, discover and serve.

OHSU experts

Find out who does what at OHSU. Identify researcher expertise, connections and funding.

Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute

The Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute (OCTRI) assists in translating biomedical advances into treatments.

Research core services

The research core services exist in order to facilitate research projects. They provide quality technical assistance from highly trained individuals for specialized and widely utilized scientific procedures.

Center for Experimental Therapeutics

The Center for Experimental Therapeutics at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute is working to develop better treatments for cancer patients through collaboration within OHSU and with other academic centers, biotech and pharmaceutical companies around the world.

Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology

The Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) provides research, education and service in the areas of clinical informatics, clinical epidemiology and bioinformatics/computational biomedicine.

Emergency Medicine

Innovate, Disruptive, Emerging Applications for Emergency Medicine (IDEA-EM). Innovate with us, we believe that some of the best opportunities to improve patient outcomes comes through bi-directional industry partnerships.

Knight Cardiovascular Institute

The Knight Cardiovascular Institute is changing the course of cardiovascular disease toward cardiovascular health.

Oregon National Primate Research Center

The Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) is one of seven National Primate Centers supported by the NIH. They support translational research and provide expertise in non-human primate models.

Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute

The Vaccine & Gene Therapy Institute develops research and teaching programs to respond to infectious disease threats, including AIDS, chronic viral infection-associated diseases, newly emerging diseases and infectious diseases of the elderly.

Cancer Early Detection Advanced Research Center

The Knight Cancer Institute’s Cancer Early Detection Advanced Research Center (CEDAR) is researching new methods to detect and eliminate cancer early.

Precision Oncology-SMMART program

SMMART (Serial Measurements of Molecular and Architectural Responses to Therapy) is the flagship project of the Knight Cancer Institute’s new Precision Oncology program.

The Vollum Institute

The Vollum Institute is dedicated to basic research that will lead to new treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases. Vollum scientists have broad ranging interests that coalesce around molecular neurobiology and cellular physiology.