The Lausanne University Hospital, known locally as the CHUV, was recently ranked among the best hospitals in the world – but it has no plans to rest on its laurels. Its dedicated Innovation Office, founded in 2022, continually seeks out new opportunities to realise novel ideas and facilitate collaborations to generate clinical benefits. We spoke to the Director of Innovation and Clinical Research, Mauro Oddo, about the importance of innovation in the hospital environment and what he’d like to see in this arena moving forward.
 
Can you tell us about your background and how you came to work in innovation?
 
First and foremost, I’m a doctor, specialising in critical care medicine. I also have over 15 years’ experience in clinical research in the United States and Switzerland, with a focus on acute comas and innovative neurotechnologies to monitor the human brain.

Having built wide-ranging expertise as well as relationships with companies and institutions across the field, I then had the opportunity to take up this role as Director of Innovation and Clinical Research at the CHUV. Here, I leverage my experience to support the hospital’s 13,000 employees (as well as external partners) in developing and adopting solutions to advance research, training and care.

In terms of operations, this means supervising the different units that support the setting up of clinical trials, facilitating technology transfers and promoting new methods in data science and health technology. All this work is done in close collaboration with the Faculty of Biology and Medicine at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and takes advantage of the close synergies between the Innovation Office and PACTT, the joint technology transfer office of the CHUV and UNIL.

What is the CHUV’s unique selling point, especially in the context of its recent ranking by Newsweek? How important is innovation in maintaining this position?

The CHUV certainly stands out for its innovativeness – and we believe that innovation is an integral part of any hospital. Still, the focus is always on serving patients and providing them with tangible clinical benefits. So, when we innovate, we are always looking to raise the quality of care we offer. For example, thanks to a number of recent data science projects focused on furthering predictive and personalised medicine, we now offer our patients even better, more tailored therapies, while also providing our doctors with a clearer, more streamlined workflow.

The ranking only makes us more motivated to keep up the quality of our clinical care and continue innovating to improve patient outcomes.

You’re notably situated in the Swiss Health Valley. Do you pursue partnerships with local stakeholders to drive innovation?

Yes, there are many advantages to this. At the CHUV, as a large, well-established institution, we see ourselves as facilitators of scientific partnerships, creating spaces from the top down, so that bottom-up initiatives can thrive. We often meet people with great ideas, but they face obstacles to get these ideas off the ground. That’s where we come in, facilitating collaborations, providing testing spaces, and advising on funding, intellectual property, contracts, technology transfers and the like. To support this, we organise events for our employees and partners, fostering the exchange of ideas and people in a supportive environment.

Beyond this, local collaborations develop very organically. The CHUV is linked to the Faculty of Biology and Medicine at UNIL, situated at Biopôle, and we also partner with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). This allows physicians and researchers to connect with each other, as well as with life sciences companies in the area. There’s a wealth of expertise in the community, to which we’re just one contributor.

What role do clinical trials play in the CHUV’s innovation strategy – and how do you ensure that they are executed successfully? Can you give an example of a ‘bench to bedside’ success story that has improved patient outcomes?

Like other university hospitals in Switzerland, the CHUV runs local centralised Clinical Trial Units at the Centre of Clinical Research, which is affiliated to the wider Swiss Clinical Trial Organisation (SCTO). We have rigorous frameworks in place to ensure our trials run smoothly, and we also have an excellent regulatory sponsor office that advises applicants on any administration related to research protocols etc.

With all this in place, we’ve seen many ‘bench to bedside’ success stories at the CHUV. We’re very proud to have supported a number of CHUV clinicians in managing multicentre investigator-initiated studies, sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and we have also realised our own high-impact trials, such as the RECOVERY trial during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is important that we continue to pursue these sorts of trials and also emulate the agility we demonstrated during this period, when we successfully unlocked the barriers (financial and logistical) that can otherwise slow down the process.

On the topic of barriers, the life sciences market is currently seeing some financial constraints and difficulties. How do you go about maintaining a positive, innovative outlook in this landscape?

That’s a good question. In critical moments such as these, I like to focus in on what’s most important for us, which is always performance – but innovation flows naturally from this. We’re constantly asking ourselves how we can improve performance, make our processes more efficient and give patients the best possible experience; working backwards, the key is always innovation (pursuing innovative research to develop innovative treatment methods).

So, in terms of CHUV funding, we will certainly continue investing in innovation, but we also have to think carefully about where we direct our efforts and investment. We need to be pragmatic, carefully evaluating the value of research projects not just in terms of scientific impact but also clinical and innovation impact. In other words, how much change in clinical practice the given project will bring.

Looking to the future, what areas of innovation will be most critical for advancing healthcare? Can you share any projects or trials currently underway at the CHUV that could make a real impact?

We’re at the dawn of digital transformation in healthcare: applied data science and AI have the potential to transform clinical practice across every field of medicine. So we’re seeing many clinical research projects using data and AI to generate personalised therapies and predictive medicine.

The CHUV also has a strong reputation in oncology, immunology, neuroscience and infectious diseases, and so I hope to see innovative new treatments in these fields. What’s more, rates of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases are on the rise with our ageing population in Switzerland (and in the wider Western world), so we must grapple with how to treat these conditions and ease the burden on healthcare institutions. We currently have projects underway that directly address geriatric care, Parkinson’s disease, sleep disorders, brain tumours… the list goes on. It’s certainly an interesting moment for healthcare – I can’t wait to see what happens next!