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SearchCleveland Clinic Innovations thought leaders range from Engagement Partners to Innovations Development and Cleveland Clinic Ventures team members. Senior Engagement Partner, Bernardo Perez-Villa, MD, MSc, had his work featured in esteemed publications, JAMA Internal Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics.
After completing medical school in Mendoza, Argentina, and training as a cardiologist in Barcelona, Spain, Bernardo transitioned from clinical practice to entrepreneurship in 2018. With a background in statistics and a Master of Health Economics and Outcomes, he moved to the United States in 2020, during the pandemic, to work at the Heart and Vascular Institute at Cleveland Clinic Weston as a research associate. Thanks to the Innovation Fellow program from the Proof of Concept office, Bernardo gained the expertise to join Cleveland Clinic Innovations, where he now serves as Senior Engagement Partner for the Florida market.
Bernardo understands the language that many inventors use and the unmet clinical needs that caregiver inventors face when submitting their ideas to Cleveland Clinic Innovations. This enables him to quickly grasp the proposed innovation and challenge it from a broader, more practical perspective, ensuring its potential for real-world impact.
While Bernardo is no longer a practicing physician, he still has made great impacts in the field of medicine and understanding the impact of innovation towards advancing patient care around the world. His work on the provenance of medicines that entered the French market between 2008 and 2018, and their resulting benefit, was featured in a November 2023 issue of the prestigious JAMA Internal Medicine. In the article titled “Provenance and Clinical Benefit of Medicines Introduced to the French Market, 2008 to 2018,” Bernardo and his team found that medicines originating from academic settings were rated as having better clinical benefit compared to those developed by the industry. This cross-sectional study analyzed 632 medicines, of which 464 (73%) originated from the commercial sector, while 168 (27%) came from academia or academic-commercial collaborations. Despite the industry producing nearly three times as many medicines, those developed in academic settings demonstrated superior clinical value.
Additionally, Bernardo was featured in a December 2023 article published in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, a monthly peer-reviewed medical journal that covers research on the nature, action, efficacy, and evaluation of therapeutics. In the article titled “The Origin of First-in-Class Drugs: Innovation Versus Clinical Benefit” Bernardo and his team identified the provenance of the first-in-class (FIC) drugs that entered the French market and matched these medicines to the clinical benefit grading by Haute Autorité de Santé (HAS) and Prescrire. Following analyses, they found that 55% of FIC medicines that entered the French market over the 10-year period delivered no additional clinical benefit. Whereas FIC medicines may represent important scientific advancements in drug development, in > 50% of cases, the new mode of action does not translate into additional clinical benefits for patients.
Read Bernardo’s full work featured in “The Origin of First-in-Class Drugs: Innovation Versus Clinical Benefit” and “Provenance and Clinical Benefit of Medicines Introduced to the French Market, 2008 to 2018”
