For generations, New Jersey has turned big ideas into world-changing industries.
Our state helped give rise to breakthroughs in pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, computing, and medicine that changed the world. Today, New Jersey remains home to extraordinary assets: leading universities and research institutions, one of the nation’s strongest concentrations of life sciences companies, world-class health systems, a highly skilled workforce and unparalleled access to capital and markets.
But innovation does not happen simply because those assets exist. It happens when we connect them.
That is the idea behind The HELIX in New Brunswick — and why its opening represents much more than the completion of a new building. It represents an investment in a new model for New Jersey’s innovation economy.
The first phase of The HELIX brings together medical education, scientific research, clinical expertise, entrepreneurs and investors in a single ecosystem designed around collaboration. Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School has already welcomed students to its new home here. Rutgers researchers will work in state-of-the-art laboratories designed to support 80 research teams. And the New Jersey Innovation Hub will give emerging companies access to the facilities, expertise, and relationships they need to turn promising ideas into viable businesses.
For RWJBarnabas Health, this work is inseparable from our mission as New Jersey’s largest academic health system.
Our longstanding partnership with Rutgers connects a leading public research university with a leading health system caring for millions of New Jerseyans. That relationship will grow even more important as Rutgers works to bring Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and New Jersey Medical School together under a single accreditation as the Rutgers School of Medicine — more closely linking medical education, research, and clinical care.
The HELIX gives that partnership a physical center of gravity — a place where a question that emerges while treating a patient can inform research in a laboratory, and where a discovery in that laboratory can ultimately become a new therapy, device, or approach to care.
But discoveries also need entrepreneurs willing to build companies around them and capital willing to invest in their potential.
That is why RWJBarnabas Health recently joined the New Jersey Economic Development Authority as the exclusive healthcare partner in a $10 million investment fund managed by Portal Innovations. We will match the NJEDA’s investment with up to $5 million to support promising New Jersey life sciences startups affiliated with the Innovation Hub at The HELIX. Pairing early-stage capital with access to clinicians, researchers, laboratories, and real-world care settings can help innovators validate technologies, design meaningful clinical studies, navigate adoption, and move promising therapies, devices, and care solutions from laboratory to bedside.
For a health system, that is an investment with two potential returns. Successful companies can create jobs, attract additional investments, and strengthen our local economy. At the same time, clinicians and researchers can help entrepreneurs focus their innovations on real patient needs and move promising discoveries more quickly from the laboratory to the bedside.
We are also advancing this work at The HELIX through the newly launched Rutgers/RWJBarnabas Health Innovation Hub, powered by AWS — one of the nation’s first technology hubs to unite a medical school, academic health system, and cloud technology leader. Students, faculty, clinicians, and AWS experts can apply cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities to real health care challenges, moving ideas from concept to implementation. The hub can strengthen clinical decision-making, operations, care coordination, health equity, and patient experience while preparing the next generation of health care innovators.
Together, these investments reflect a broader philosophy: Health systems should not simply adopt innovations after others create them. We should help create the conditions in which innovation develops.
The opportunity extends beyond health care. When researchers, physicians, students, entrepreneurs, and investors work together, they create companies, jobs, and intellectual property; attract talent and private investment; and build an ecosystem that grows stronger over time.
That is the larger promise of The HELIX.
When fully developed, The HELIX is planned as a three-building, 1.5-million-square-foot district representing approximately $2 billion in investment, with more than 4,000 people researching, working, learning, and living there. But its ultimate impact will not be measured by square footage or the New Brunswick skyline.
It will be measured by what happens inside: the discoveries made, companies launched, jobs created, physicians trained, and patients whose lives are improved.
New Jersey has never lacked bold ideas. Our opportunity now is to build the connections that allow those ideas to become discoveries, companies, and treatments.
The HELIX is where those connections are coming together — and where an important new chapter in New Jersey’s innovation economy is beginning.
John Doll is Chief Operating Officer of RWJBarnabas Health. Chris Paladino is the President of the New Brunswick Development Corporation (DEVCO) and the CEO of The HELIX.
