Texas A&M students in a new Houston-based engineering and medicine program will attend normal medical school courses. And they'll see patients to learn how to be doctors.

But the 50 physician engineers studying in the program also will be expected to invent something "transformational" by the time they graduate.

"A lot of it is so futuristic, it's hard to imagine it happening in our lifetime," A&M Chancellor John Sharp said Friday during a ceremony announcing a new partnership between Texas A&M University and Houston Methodist hospital.

Leaders from both institutions talked optimistically about the new program, a medical school track that will enroll students with engineering degrees and place a heavy emphasis on entrepreneurship. They talked about the kinds of inventions they want to see from students in the program: Regenerating limbs and organs, robots to help with surgery, sensors that can send information from patients in rural south Texas to doctors in the Texas Medical Center.

"This is a program where we have a goal and certainly an expectation of the students to change the world, to change healthcare through technology," A&M Engineering Dean Katherine Banks said. "This program is much more than just an academic program. This is a program to truly transform healthcare as we know it and develop the healthcare tools of the future."

The program may still need some approval from accrediting bodies before it is fully formed, but A&M officials said they will start enrolling students for the fall 2017 semester. The program will be an expansion of an existing partnership between A&M and Methodist. To the typical medical school training, it will add laboratories for experimentation and offices with commercialization experts who can help students get patents for their inventions.

A&M will hire 25 new faculty for the program and it will enroll 50 students at a time.