Catalyst is a joint strategic effort between the School of Medicine, Stanford Health Care, and Stanford Children’s Health, and serves as Stanford Medicine’s flagship innovation program to support inventors across the Stanford community in developing and accelerating their most promising innovations for transforming health.

Catalyst supports transformative, prototype-stage innovations across the spectrum of healthcare. See Catalyst project considerations for additional details.

Catalyst supports healthcare projects from inventors across Stanford’s community - including projects from faculty, staff, and students.

Most Catalyst-funded innovations have developed a pathway for intellectual property protection, inclusive of engagement with Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing with a minimum of a provisional patent application (an issued patent is not required). However, it should be noted that certain projects may not need patent protection for their long-term success and contributions to Stanford and global healthcare innovation.

Catalyst funds projects with some level of enablement, beyond solely a concept or basic science – e.g. with an early working prototype, and/or feasibility data, or other early data to validate the potential of your innovation.

Catalyst engages with projects at an early stage, after the project has achieved some level of enablement, with an expectation that the project can translate beyond the current stage of research/development after successful completion of its foundational project milestones in Catalyst. For some projects this translation will mean incorporation, and funding from outside investors. For others, this may include partnering with industry, licensing technology, or translation/integration into clinical care. In other words, Catalyst aims to advance innovations from prototype to execution or from beta to production application, enabling immediate impact for patients – or as soon as possible following graduation from Catalyst.

Catalyst fosters selected innovations by offering capital (up to $1M), operational-support, mentorship and access to industry and investment experts. Catalyst is not a research grant. Catalyst rolls up its sleeves with you – aiding your project along the way – delivering necessary resources, such as program management, validation resources, testing and enterprise-level deployment and implementation within Stanford Medicine clinical settings or its broader health care system, go-to-market resources, readiness for independence and exposure to outside investors.

Currently, Catalyst opens application windows for incoming innovations on an at-least annual cycle. To see if a current application window is open click here.  Applications received are thoroughly reviewed and evaluated by the Catalyst team, alongside guidance from expert teams from Stanford Medicine, partnering industry entrepreneurs, operators and investors. The applicant pool is then cut down to finalists and advancing projects move through successive evaluation stages and emerge as Catalyst award recipients.