Frances Toneguzzo

Research Ventures & Licensing (RVL) is a division of Partners HealthCare that coordinates all commercialization services across Partners HealthCare, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital. The intent is for RVL to be a cohesive, coordinated group to service inventors, thought-leaders, entrepreneurs and industry. The team has backgrounds in licensing, patenting, bench research, finance, funding, business, law and start-ups. RVL is focused on technologies developed within the Partners system by the investigators and clinicians at any Partners entity. Technologies range from devices, to diagnostics, to therapeutics to information systems. The RVL's 'Innovation Fund' was created in 2007 by Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital to address a growing unmet need for funding emerging technology in the capital gap between invention and product development. The main objective of the fund is to accelerate to market technologies developed by Partners HealthCare investigators, thereby enhancing healthcare quality, cost and outcomes. Structured as a separate LLC entity, the $35M Fund is evergreen in design and will reinvest all gains from investments back into the Fund to create capital for additional investments.