For months, we’ve been sharing with you all the ways that scientific discoveries at UT Health San Antonio have and will change lives. Now the university has added a team member it hopes will increase that impact.
His name is Anthony Francis, and he is not a scientist.
“I'm a commercial person who's taken a product or two to market and also built a whole consultancy around how to get products and services to market,” Francis said.
He is the associate vice president of innovation and development at UT Health San Antonio. He thinks it’s important that he’s kind of an outsider, because he sees things differently.
“The very first question that most universities asks when it comes to commercializing something is obviously, what's the technical merit of this? he said. “The second question is can we patent it?”
“And does the market care is a much more powerful question than those other questions.” Francis continued. “If we're going to turn the technical innovation into a market based innovation or an innovation that actually is used by someone, the question about does anyone care becomes pivotal.”
Francis is particularly excited about possibilities in the digital space, including prescription digital therapeutics like the KIOS app, which is designed to help people with substance use disorder in their recovery.
Science & Medicine is a collaboration between TPR and The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio that explores how scientific discovery in San Antonio advances the way medicine is practiced everywhere.
