Researchers and engineers with great ideas sometimes need help getting their innovations from the concept stage to being a fully marketed product, and that’s where Lebanon’s Simbex comes into play.
Rick Greenwald, the CEO and president of Simbex, said his company works with researchers to get their products ready.
“We develop products for commercialization, end-to-end commercialization, de-risking their technology, getting it ready for the commercial market,” Greenwald said.
Simbex focuses on wearable technology like fall prevention devices for the elderly, products that help prevent pressure ulcers for people who are bedridden, wound care technologies to help keep wounds from getting worse, and for head impact products for sports.
Simbex works with researchers at Rydell to develop helmets and educational tools to study and prevent head injuries. Rydell makes football helmets. In fact, the company got its start with helmet technology after Greenwald became fascinated watching freestyle skiers. He watched the skiers take to the air, and counted dozens of falls where they landed with their head in the snow.
Eventually Simbex developed the Head Impact Telemetry System to help improve helmet and head safety for a variety of sports.
The Simbex team is able to work out the issue a particular product might have getting to market, testing out how it will get used in the field, and clearing the various regulatory hurdles the product might face, Greenwald said.
“Some of the biggest risks might not be technical,” he said.
Working to de-risk products means that innovative technologies that could help millions of people will get out there instead of getting tied up in development.
“The value of providing commercialization services is that more technologies end up in clinical use rather than be stuck as a research only item,” he said.
Simbex also partners with Celendra Medical on the DRIVEN biomedical accelerator hub. DRIVEN is funded by the National Institute of Health with the aim to help startups in the biomedical field get their products to market. Greenwald said it’s another way to help researchers make the transition into the commercialization of their concepts.
It’s no accident there are so many technologically advanced startups in the Upper Valley, Greenwald said. The collaborative nature of much of the work is part of the culture in the region, he said.
“There is an incredibly strong ecosystem in the Upper Valley around medical technology and technical innovation in general,” Greenwald said. “It really lends itself to collaborative work.”
Jamie Coughlin, with Dartmouth College’s Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship, said Greenwald and Simbex have helped the region’s medical startup culture.
“It has been a pleasure collaborating with Rick and his Simbex team over the years, as we collectively work to build out the life sciences community here in the Upper Valley,” Coughlin said. “It will be even more exciting in the year to come, as we at Dartmouth and the Norris Cotton Cancer Center, partner with Simbex to increase our entrepreneurial education and startup support services for Dartmouth’s research community.
“This partnership will help accelerate the promise of moving game changing ideas into commercially ready products for patients and consumers worldwide,” he said.
