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The New Frontier of Health

Thanks to world-class research labs, a robust talent pipeline, and a unique culture of collaboration, the Midwest has become a global leader in healthcare innovation

The Midwest has long had a reputation as a place where things are made, not invented. But look closer and a different story emerges, particularly as it relates to healthcare. From the surgical robotics labs of Minneapolis and the AI-powered drug-discovery platforms of Indianapolis to the research towers rising along Cleveland’s Fairfax neighborhood and the biotech incubators of Ann Arbor, Michigan, the heartland has emerged as one of the most consequential regions in the world for healthcare innovation. What makes the Midwest distinctive is not any single institution or breakthrough but rather the dense, self-reinforcing ecosystem that has taken root here over generations, built on a culture of long-term thinking, deliberate collaboration, and a genuine belief in the common good. The scale is impressive. Nationally, AI-enabled digital health startups attracted $3.3 billion in venture funding in the first 10 months of 2024. A growing share of that capital is moving toward Midwest founders and institutions that have spent decades building the clinical depth, manufacturing expertise, and research infrastructure that investors now recognize as indispensable. The region is home to 105 Fortune 500 companies—among them some of the most influential names in healthcare—and to major teaching hospitals and research universities in nearly every state, which simultaneously serve as engines of both discovery and talent development. Companies founded elsewhere are increasingly establishing operations in the Midwest (Japan-based Canon’s subsidiary, Canon Healthcare, is located in Cleveland), drawn by the concentration of expertise that cannot be replicated overnight. The roots of that concentration run deep. Ohio has organized its own health innovation assets into the Ohio Discovery Corridor—connecting research districts in Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati through an estimated $3 billion in combined investment. Cleveland Clinic alone invested $147.3 million in research in 2024, supporting more than 3,600 active projects. Its Innovation District has a strategic partnership with Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. In Michigan, the University of Michigan’s $2.04 billion research enterprise funds more than 16,000 researchers statewide, with its Fast Forward Medical Innovation unit translating lab discoveries into companies at a record pace. The Ann Arbor region hosts more than 250 life sciences firms, and UM-pioneered technologies like histotripsy—a noninvasive method for destroying tumors with focused ultrasound—illustrate the bench-to-bedside pipeline the state is built to sustain. Minnesota’s Medical Alley—recognized as the No. 1 health technology cluster in the world—is home to nearly 530 medical device establishments employing more than 35,000 people, a labor concentration more than four times the national average. In 2023, the federal government designated Minnesota MedTech Hub 3.0 as one of 31 inaugural national Tech Hubs, an acknowledgment that the state’s integration of AI, machine learning, and data science into medical devices represents a genuine national strategic asset. At the center of Minnesota’s ecosystem is Medtronic, founded in a Minneapolis garage in 1949 and now the world’s largest medical device company. Its history is inseparable from the region’s: The engineers and executives it trained over decades spun out to form Boston Scientific’s cardiac franchise, St. Jude Medical, and dozens of suppliers that have strengthened the entire ecosystem. Today, Medtronic is making huge strides in robot-assisted surgery and neuroscience, where the company is pioneering adaptive brain stimulation that adjusts therapy in real time to a patient’s live neural signals, with implications for Parkinson’s, epilepsy, and chronic pain. Kelly Wei, VP of corporate strategy and innovation at Medtronic, describes the draw of the region: “You come to the U.S. and look at where the corporations are, where the startups are, where the suppliers are—and you just naturally get drawn into Minnesota.”

05-07-26

“You come to the U.S. and look at where the corporations are, where the startups are, where the suppliers are—and you just naturally get drawn into Minnesota.”

– Kelly Wei, VP, corporate strategy and innovation, Medtronic

Indiana tells a similar story through Eli Lilly & Company, which marks its 150th year in Indianapolis while operating with an urgency that belies its age. Lilly has built one of the most sophisticated AI operations in the pharmaceutical industry, anchored by what the company and Nvidia call the pharmaceutical industry’s most powerful supercomputer and AI factory, now operational in Indianapolis. The two are also collaborating on a co-innovation lab in San Francisco, a planned investment of up to $1 billion over five years to accelerate drug discovery and development. Generative AI is now exploring molecular spaces that no human scientist could search in a lifetime, surfacing drug candidates that have genuinely surprised veteran researchers. Such commitment to innovation speaks to the company’s unofficial motto: The patient is waiting. “You go fast because people are literally waiting for you,” says Diogo Rau, Lilly’s chief information and digital officer. “They might not make it in some cases without some of these medicines if you take too long.” What binds all this into something greater than the sum of its parts is structural collaboration. The University of Minnesota codevelops healthcare solutions and runs 20 joint recruitment hackathons with Medtronic each year. Mayo Clinic’s $5.6 billion Destination Medical Center initiative in Rochester, Minnesota, has effectively built a city around cross-sector health innovation. Minnesota’s CEO community has convened collectively since the 1970s to work through shared challenges. Cincinnati Children’s Hospital maintains a pipeline of more than 1,000 technologies in active development. These are not gestures toward collaboration; they are structural commitments that compound over time and create conditions no single company or campus could manufacture on its own. The Midwest has always known how to build things that last. Its hospitals, universities, and companies think in decades, not quarters. That instinct—once caricatured as provincial caution—turns out to be exactly what breakthrough medicine requires. From sensing the human brain and designing molecules no scientist has yet imagined to democratizing surgical outcomes in under-resourced communities and reframing public conversations around Alzheimer’s and obesity, the Midwest is not watching the future of health unfold from a distance. It is writing the story.