The Graduate School of Medicine of Osaka University created the Medical Center for Translational and Clinical Research at Osaka University Hospital in 2002 in order to ardently promote translational research involving promising basic research on and off campus. The Graduate School created CoMIT in 2014 to further this effort by reinforcing the partnership with industry with the goal of creating, developing, and commercially exploiting new, innovative drugs and medical technologies.
Creating a research center for
open innovation
Conventional collaboration between industry and academia mainly consisted of university laboratories or individual researchers separately conducting joint research with companies. “Collaboration” actually meant a set of connected points.
CoMIT has assembled company representatives, university personnel, and researchers in different fields in the same facility. CoMIT seeks to provide an environment that fosters links among disparate laboratories and projects. CoMIT also seeks to integrate the results of wide-ranging research and technologies and it seeks to rapidly put those results to clinical and commercial use.
Collaboration with government agencies and research institutes on and off campus
Since its planning phase, CoMIT has collaborated with Osaka Prefecture‘s Section for Life Science Industries. The Osaka Biotech Strategy was formulated with Osaka Prefecture as its core, and CoMIT has endeavored to be a center that aligns with that strategy.
CoMIT collaborates with research facilities on campus as well as with biotech companies concentrated in Northern Osaka (which is where Osaka University is located), other universities, and world-class research institutes in surrounding areas, such as the National Institutes of Biomedical Innovation, Health, and Nutrition and the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center.
