Timothy Brundle, executive director of Innovation Ulster Ltd., says the service represents the university’s latest effort to get more technology into the hands of entrepreneurs. “Our basic methods include contracts, research, knowledge transfer, spinouts, and IP licensing, but what we find is that many technologies sit in our portfolio and are not commercialized because of limitations the university structure places around them,” Brundle explains. “We wanted to take the technology in its rawest form and put it in the hands of an entrepreneur who could undertake the commercialization process outside the university.” The entrepreneurs, he continues, are “incentivized” to undertake the role of tech transfer and translation, but to do it outside the university. “This way, we extend the capacity of our tech transfer team with seasoned entrepreneurs,” Brundle explains. “They have access to our [seed] funds and tools.”

The OpenUlster website, launched in the fall of 2011, is populated with new technologies on an ongoing basis. Entrepreneurs, companies and other interested parties can see which technologies are currently under evaluation and which ones are available. To take out an evaluation license, they click on the link to download the necessary documents, fill out two forms and return them both to the university. When the license is countersigned by a member of the commercialization team, the firm has an exclusive period to evaluate the technology. They receive additional information about the technology that includes any published patents, experimental data, and prototypes or software.

“We give the entrepreneur a license for one Pound and charge them to take the technology, generally for six months. They go away, and we give them access to our funds, tools, and whatever resources they might need,” says Brundle. The university, he explains, has its own VC firm and internal innovation funds. “In the same way our tech transfer executives have the opportunity to pitch to those funds, we give [outside parties with an evaluation license] the opportunity to pitch to those funds as well,” Brundle reports. “In the six months they work up plans on how to commercialize the technology, which is what we look for from them.” In the first few months, he adds, 12 technologies have been put up on the site and five have been licensed on an evaluation basis. A detailed article on the OpenUlster initiative appears in the January issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the full article, along with an instant library of archived best practices and success strategies, CLICK HERE. 

As outlined by Rantanen, major points include:

• The request must be filed by the patent owner, and only the patent owner will be permitted to participate in the supplemental examination or any reexamination ordered as a result. (§ 1.601)
• Each supplemental examination request may identify up to 10 items of information to be considered, reconsidered, or corrected. Multiple supplemental examination requests may be filed at one time. (§ 1.605)
• The cost to file a supplemental examination request is $5,180 for the initial request plus $16,120 for the ex parte re-examination fee. (§ 1.20(k)) Both must be paid at the time of initial request, with the $16,120 refunded if no re-examination is ordered in the supplemental examination certificate. (§ 1.26(c)) Substantial fees also are associated with documents exceeding 20 pages and with petitions filed in connection with the proceeding. 
• The supplemental examination request must include ((§ 1.610(b)):
1. a cover sheet;
2. an identification of the patent for which supplemental examination is requested;
3. a list of each item of information and its publication date, if applicable;
4. a list identifying any other prior or concurrent post patent Office proceedings involving the patent to be examined;
5. an identification of each aspect of the patent to be examined;
6. an identification of each issue raised by each item of information;
7. a separate, detailed explanation for each identified issue;
8. an explanation of how each item of information is relevant to each aspect of the patent to be examined;
9. a copy of each item of information; and
10. a summary of the relevant portions of any submitted document, other than the request, that are more than 50 pages in length.

The PTO is accepting comments on the proposed rules until March 26, 2012. Read the relevant Federal Register section here.

Source:  Patently-O

The plaintiff in this Section 256 action, Olusegun Falana, was a postdoctoral researcher hired by Kent State and Kent Displays, Inc. to synthesize organic molecules in connection with a project to develop a temperature-independent, high helical twisting power chiral additive for use in portable liquid crystal displays, Rantanen explains. During his employment, Falana developed a synthesis protocol for making a novel class of chemical compounds. He used this process to synthesize a compound within this genus designated “Compound 7.” While Compound 7 possessed some of the desired characteristics, and represented “significant progress,” it did not completely satisfy the project goals. Falana subsequently resigned from KDI and Kent State to take another position.

A few months later, the Kent State professor who had selected Falana used Falana’s synthesis protocol to synthesize another member of the novel class, “Compound 9,” which possessed the desired degree of temperature independence. KDI and Kent State filed an application that led to Patent No. 6,830,789, which did not list Falana as an inventor. Falana subsequently filed a Section 256 action to correct inventorship, and the district court ruled in Falana’s favor following a bench trial, further finding that the case was exceptional and awarding attorney’s fees.

On appeal, the Federal Circuit concluded that Falana had contributed to the conception of the claimed invention. Drawing upon established law, the court first noted that “[c]onception of a chemical compound ‘requires knowledge of both the specific chemical structure of the compound and an operative method of making it.” Slip Op. at 12 (quoting Fina Oil & Chem. Co. v. Ewen, 123 F.3d 1466, 1473 (Fed. Cir. 1997). Falana contributed to the method of making the claimed compound in a way that required more than the exercise of ordinary skill. The court recognized an important limitation on its holding, however, writing, “[This] does not mean that such an inventor necessarily has a right to claim inventorship of all species within that genus which are discovered in the future. Once the method of making the novel genus of compounds becomes public knowledge, it is then assimilated into the store-house of knowledge that comprises ordinary skill in the art.” Id. at 15-16.

Source: Patently-O

ALSO COMING SOON:

• February 15: Licensee Red Flags: 12 Critical Signs that Should Trigger an Audit
• February 15: SBIR/STTR Grant Funding: Innovation Research and Technology Transfer
• February 28: How to Outsource and Offshore TTO Activities for Huge Savings and Efficiency Gains
• March 21: Patent Prosecution Cost-Saving Strategies: Increase Your TTO’s Filings Without Increasing Your Budget

O’Shea is co-editing a book of essays on these topics, entitled Building Technology Transfer within Research Universities, scheduled for release this year by Cambridge University Press. “We’re still not obtaining any Irish high-performance companies despite the efforts of funding research and technology transfer through organizations such as Science Foundation Ireland,” he says. “Most are lifestyle companies, add-on consulting companies, rather than high impact companies.”

A critical problem is that Irish university TTOs are “largely pursuing a ‘revenue maximus’ approach — what’s the best return for the university for every deal we can do — rather than turning it around and asking, what can we do to disseminate knowledge into the local community?” Most of the IP developed inside of universities will never be utilized for university-centered spinouts but could be used productively by entrepreneurs and companies outside the university structure, he argues. He sees this is a more natural role for universities already funded by taxpayers, as it would put community-funded research back into the community to create jobs.

Another problem is that prospective researcher-entrepreneurs are disillusioned by the structure in place in TTOs, he asserts. “The transaction costs of engaging with TTOs [are] seen as a disincentive and often are onerous for entrepreneurs and new firms,” according to O’Shea. In addition, he says Irish TTOs take 15% equity in companies, which is a “massive amount” for any company, especially by international standards.

In addition, the environment that has been established to help Irish start-ups actually places additional financial stresses on them. For example, some TTOs require prospective entrepreneurs to attend a business academy at personal cost, while incubator facilities set up by the government charge pre-revenue companies to use them. As a result, many Irish companies fail to successfully cross over the so-called Valley of Death, O’Shea says. “We are arguing in the book that universities should take an entrepreneurial approach to commercializing IP, rather than a bureaucratic approach,” he says.

Source: The Irish Times

Dubbed The Experiment Fund, the firm describes itself as “a bridge between America’s oldest universities and storied venture capital firms.” Backed by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the firm is comprised of Hugo Van Vurren, NEA co-head Patrick Chung, and NEA General Partner Harry Weller — all of whom have a degree of some form from Harvard.

Although the fund shares its headquarters with Harvard’s School Of Engineering and Applied Sciences, it operates with complete independence from the university. Moreover, fund leaders say they’re open to anyone, “regardless of university affiliation, nationality, age, or prior experience.” Being a Harvard student (or at least a Cambridge local) probably won’t hurt, though. The founders say they’re not setting a cap on the size of the fund. They expect to seed several companies with up to $250,000 each over the next two years.

Source: TechCrunch

• Company location
• Investment portfolios
• Companies invested in
• Areas of focus
• Primary contact personnel
• Funding areas/indications
• Stages funded
• Total dollars under management

Having easy access to this critical data can mean the difference between getting the funding you need to advance your start-up or develop your technology and seeing it die on the vine from lack of resources. With the new BioWorld Biotechnology and Medical Device VC Directory 2012, you’ll have access to the information you need — covering VCs in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia — so you can find the right financial partner and keep your company on solid ground. For more details and to order, CLICK HERE.

NanoRETE will develop and commercialize a simple, inexpensive, portable field test to detect pathogens and toxins such as E. coli, Salmonella, anthrax, tuberculosis, shiga, and STX, providing real-time detection using proprietary nanoparticle biosensors.

Outbreaks of Listeria-infected cantaloupe in Colorado and E. coli-contaminated bean sprouts in Germany are just two recent incidents that have made big headlines. These biohazards cannot currently be field-tested because pathogens typically must be cultured and developed in a lab, away from the hazard source. This weakness means that pathogens can be confirmed only after the fact — often days after the infected food has been consumed. In contrast, nanoRETE’s X-Mark solution utilizes a handheld biosensor to test for multiple pathogens or toxins on site, in real time, representing a significant leap forward in detection and diagnostic technology.

The technology uses novel nanoparticles with magnetic, polymeric, and electrical properties that were invented by Evangelyn Alocilja, MSU professor of biosystems and agricultural engineering and chief scientific officer of nanoRETE. “Our unique preparation, extraction, and detection protocol enables the entire process to be conducted in the field, without significant training,” Alocilja says. “Results are generated in about an hour from receipt of sample to final readout, quickly identifying contaminants so that proper and prompt actions can be taken.” The new technology also provides results at only a fraction of the cost of the closest currently available competing technology.

Source: CBS Detroit

Vanquish’s product candidate compounds target a cellular enzyme, procaspase-3, that when activated spurs a cascade of reactions that kill the cancer cell. Procaspase-3 offers an attractive target for cancer therapy because cancers often interfere with normal cell death. Many tumors — including those found in breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, lymphoma, melanoma, and liver cancer — contain high levels of procaspase-3. Vanquish will develop standalone cancer therapies in addition to drugs to be used in combination with other chemotherapy drugs. The start-up was founded by IllinoisVENTURES, Level 5 Partners, and UIUC inventors.

Source:  MarketWatch

OCB’s founding scientists are Nick La Thangue, professor of cancer biology in Oxford’s department of oncology, and David Kerr, professor of cancer medicine. The company has attracted a £3m investment from global biopharmaceutical services company Quintiles as part of a strategic alliance that will enable OCB to establish research facilities in Oxford to develop a range of predictive biomarkers, the first of which were developed at Oxford by the company founders.

“For the average cancer drug, usually a small proportion of patients respond, and the vast majority do not,” La Thangue explains. “A small number also become very sick because of the side effects of the drug. Our technology will not only benefit those patients who respond, but we can also avoid treating people with drugs that we know will make them sick.”

Source:  Medical Xpress

The Acublate device uses an advanced phased-array system, targeting multiple points in the tumor simultaneously. The system can be steered rapidly in 3D to target and destroy tumors. Initially, the Acublate device will treat patients with bowel cancer that has spread to the liver, but the technology has the potential to treat a range of cancers. The device is expected to significantly reduce HIFU treatment times and become a more effective and cheaper alternative to currently available HIFU therapies.

CRT and other investors raised £145,000 to develop the clinical prototype, which is expected to be ready within a year. CRT, which owns the IP to the technology, is Acublate’s major equity holder and will benefit from any future license income.

Source: Cancer Research UK

First, “free” in the legislation’s context refers to the freedom for faculty inventors to choose the tech transfer professionals who help commercialize their technology — not to the absence of cost, Schoppe points out. In considering those costs, she notes that a U.S. patent, alone, costs about $20,000 to $25,000, mostly in attorney’s fees. “Who will pay those fees?” Schoppe asks. “The innovators? Their home university? The ‘free agency’?”

Perhaps the “free agency” would work on carried interest, covering the up-front costs of patenting and marketing in exchange for future royalties, Schoppe suggests. But this prospect raises additional questions. How will the “free agency” select technologies and determine how many resources to commit? Won’t that decision be based on speed to the fastest profit? What if this decision doesn’t match up with long-term economic development goals or the university’s strategic goals for seeking future research funding? Whose portion of the royalties will pay the “free agency” fee: the innovator’s, the home university’s, or both? All three parties would need to enter a contract to make the agreement binding, because innovators usually do not have direct authority over their IP, which is owned by their home university as part of their employment contract, Schoppe points out.

If the “free agency” is another university, will that institution commit resources to an outside innovation over its home technologies? she asks. Won’t universities favor their home technologies, where they retain more of the royalty revenue and need to build relationships with their own faculty? If the “free agency” is a consultant paid on the basis of time and materials, how would those services be retained and paid?

“TTOs are concerned that the implementation questions have been ignored and, thus, policymakers have not fully appreciated the ramifications of such a program, which may end up creating new problems and not solving the original issue of speed to market,” Schoppe concludes.

Source: Fuentek Blog

1. Don’t pretend you are much larger as a company than what you really are. Turn your small size and start-up spirit into an advantage. Show them the values of start-ups: innovation and speed of execution. Establish credibility early and never lose their trust.
2. Address their concerns about your small size and risks. Show how you have planned your project to isolate your customer from legal and business risks.
3. Be financially prepared to survive delivery milestones. Complex projects could require several delivery milestones before you get paid. Of course, it would be optimal to receive a large up-front chunk that helps you finance your project, but insisting on such a condition during negotiations may lower your chances of winning the contract unless you have a captive product with very little competition. The good news is some investors would be willing to finance your company or project once you have a Fortune 500 contract.
4. Don’t get caught up in your own world and your great technology. Nobody cares about you or your technology — they care about what you can do for them, and how their life will be different after buying your product. “If you manage to persuade them that it would be much better, you may have a chance of a second meeting,” Iskander writes. “This is where you need to spend a lot of effort preparing for your sales pitch. Try to understand the company’s top strategic objectives and programs. The more your offering can anchor tightly into one or more of these strategic objectives and programs, the more likely you will be successful.”
5. Find an internal champion. Your project will get lost in the maze of a big customer’s organization unless you establish a strong relationship with someone who believes in your project and has influence.
6. Keep your sales pitch simple and professional. Create some “Aha” moments in your presentation. Practice these very well. “It is difficult to get a first meeting, but a lot more difficult to get a second one,” Iskander points out. “You must earn it every time.”
7. Be confident. You are dealing with normal people, many of whom fancy the idea of working for themselves or in a start-up. They want you to deliver your product and to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Source: The Tech Entrepreneurship Blog

Conventional wisdom holds that successful fundraising requires introductions to investors, a clear pitch, and the ability to signal the presence of a high-quality founding team. In tracking nine Internet-security start-ups that sought multiple venture rounds over their first five years and sampling companies across the U.S. that had raised at least one investment round, Hallen and Eisenhardt found these practices weren’t enough. Instead, they say, efficient fundraising also depends on four catalyzing strategies.

Step 1: Engage in casual dating. Meet informally, but deliberately and repeatedly, with a few investors a couple of months before formally seeking an investment. One entrepreneur strategically courted VCs for several months by seeking their advice on his start-up business model over a series of casual lunches, then disclosed he was raising a round. Within 10 days, a courted investor made an offer. Others followed. Investors become psychologically invested in ventures that follow their advice, Hallen says.

Step 2: Structure timing around proof points. Time formal investment requests around signals that indicate the accomplishment of an externally validated milestone, such as the attraction of the first paying customer. “Proof points are vital for fundraising, yet occur relatively infrequently,” Hallen points out. “Accordingly, some entrepreneurs with a recent proof point, but without an immediate need for capital, still went ahead and sought investments earlier than they otherwise might.” Timing around proof points provides a simple signal of progress that is credible and easy to understand, he adds.

Step 3: Assess the interest of potential funders. Just because a venture capitalist voices interest in a business idea doesn’t mean an investment is in store. Efficient entrepreneurs recognize that talk can be cheap; they don’t simply take a VC at face value.

Step 4: Craft alternatives. Efficient entrepreneurs establish multiple routes that can lead to fundraising success, because potential investors tend to be hesitant. As one financier told us: “There is no incentive for me to act too soon. I would rather give the company plenty of time to either prove to me that what they said three to four months ago was correct, or prove it was incorrect.” 

Source: Bloomberg

Iwao Ojima, director of the Institute of Chemical Biology & Drug Discovery and distinguished professor of chemistry at Stony Brook, and colleagues who discovered the benzimidazole-based compounds will work with Sanofi to optimize them with the goal of identifying drug candidates ready for investigational new drug filing and clinical development in treating TB — especially multi-drug resistant TB. The CDC estimates that one-third of the world’s population may be infected with latent TB, and approximately 12 million people suffer from active infection.

Source: Stony Brook News

Source: inovia.com

While university administrators were certainly aware of the express licensing agreements unveiled at the University of North Carolina, the University of Hawaii, the University of Maryland, and other institutions, the only thing they borrowed from these other instruments was the express concept, explains Eugene Krentsel, Binghamton’s assistant vice president for entrepreneurship and innovation partnerships. “Those are strictly licensing deals. Ours is targeted at a different stage of negotiations, at the time when we negotiate a sponsored research agreement,” he says. Consequently, the structure, purpose and clauses are all aimed at a different demographic.

“We have about 18% of our external sponsored research coming from industry,” says Krentsel. “And we were struggling, just like everyone else, to find a way to limit inefficiencies in the negotiation process, especially in the early stages.” Among the principal hang-ups were all the IP-related clauses that are necessarily part of the process. “As our office plays a major role in helping to negotiate these clauses in sponsored research agreements, we were brought in every time, again and again, and the negotiation was something that took a very long time,” he explains. “However, at the end of the day, it was not necessarily a good investment of that time.”

To get around these problems, the university developed what it is calling the Binghamton Express Square Terms or BEST Deal License, a nonexclusive, royalty-free license on patentable innovations that arise from sponsored research. “Structurally, the BEST becomes an exhibit to the research agreement, so it is designed as a seek-and-obtain style license, with the company sponsor having the option that it can exercise,” explains Scott Hancock, the director of IP management at the university. “We are looking at a very modest licensing fee and then we are looking to recover our patent costs.”

Only the company sponsoring the research is entitled to the BEST license, explains Krentsel, noting that this is in exchange for actually validating the technology and proving its commercial value. “It actually increases the value of the license for anybody else,” he says. “If another company wants to come in and get a NERF [non-exclusive, royaltyfree license], yes they can do that, but it will cost them more money. We are guaranteeing this [to the sponsoring company].” A detailed article on the BEST license appears in the December 2011 issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the full article, plus more than four years of archived back issues filled with practical TTO success strategies, CLICK HERE.

Get in front of people. “We only meet with 15% to 20% of the teams that talk to us,” Clavier says. Make sure you “get the meeting” by doing your homework to target investors, using tools such as Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and Google. Learn who is investing at your stage and in your industry. “Then figure out who’s in your network,” Clavier advises. “Who can introduce you to the desired investor?” Learn who knows the VCs you’re targeting, reach out to that middle man, then craft an introduction email for that contact to send the VC. “If you look at our history, having seen 10,000 opportunities — based on how many meetings I take — of the 114 deals I’ve closed, exactly zero reached out to me in a cold e-mail,” Clavier says.

Prepare for the face-to-face meeting. Once you’re in front of a VC, you’ve already achieved the top 15% to 20% of opportunities, according to Clavier. Now, you need to show why you’re so passionate about your idea that you’re prepared to spend five to 10 years of your life trying to build a company. “Some people will walk through walls,” Clavier says. “Absolute persistent determination is something we want to try to feel.”

Plan your slideshow. Expect a one-hour meeting, Clavier says. Your slideshow should include a demo of the application or the service. “We expect people to build the initial prototype and have initial users,” he adds, suggesting 20 or 50 users. Start-ups also can validate their ideas doing simple advertising — for example, using Facebook ads using a budget of just $500 to $1,000.

Be different. “Something that is radical is something that will rank highly for us,” Clavier says. “We are in the business of taking risk. So we are looking [for something] that’s bold and different.” The goal of the first meeting is to get to the second meeting, he adds, noting that he calls references after the first meeting and decides in 10 days to two weeks whether the opportunity is interesting enough to pursue. “We get 20 business plans a day, so 2,000 a year,” he says. “We meet with 15 percent who send us e-mails. We work on 10 companies a month. We dig deep into five of them, and we do two deals. We say no 99.5% of the time.”

Source:  Business Insider

Tech transfer professionals and IP practitioners need to quickly get up to speed on the details of this potentially damaging provision. That’s why our Distance Learning Division has teamed up with attorney experts Michael T. Siekman and Ed Walsh from the Wolf Greenfield IP Law Firm to present this hour-long educational webinar: Life Under AIA: Anticipating and Surviving Post Grant Challenges. Join us this Thursday, January 26, 2012, when Mr. Siekman and Mr. Walsh will provide a detailed review of the post-grant review provisions, their likely impact, remaining uncertainties as the USPTO deals with implementation, and strategies to begin planning now for both patent drafting and responding effectively to post-grant actions. For complete program details and to register, CLICK HERE.

COMING IN FEBRUARY:

• Wednesday, February 15: Licensee Red Flags: 12 Critical Signs that Should Trigger an Audit
• Wednesday, February 15: SBIR/STTR Grant Funding: Innovation Research and Technology Transfer
• Tuesday, February 28: How to Outsource and Offshore TTO Activities for Huge Savings and Efficiency Gains

The Top 10 countries of origin for European filings were:

A more complete list of filings by country of origin can be found here. According to IFI Claims Patent Services, a company that produces global patent databases, 224,505 utility patents were issued in the U.S. last year, an increase of 2% over the 219,614 patents that were issued in 2010, Zuhn adds. IFI also released a list of the Top 50 companies receiving U.S. patents last year, including these Top 10:

The only life sciences company making the list was E I Du Pont de Nemours & Co. Asian firms accounted for 25 of the top 50 U.S. patent recipients, with U.S. firms capturing 17 slots. Last month, Reuters reported that China surpassed the U.S. in terms of application filings in 2010, Zuhn adds, with figures for 2011 not yet available. Citing a Thomson Reuters research report, Reuters said that published applications in China had risen by an average of 16.7% annually, from 171,000 in 2006 to 314,000 in 2010. Published applications are expected to top 500,000 in 2015, with filings in the U.S. and Japan amounting to 400,000 and 300,000, respectively.

Source:  Patent Docs

The council aims to generate creative ideas and foster common interests in innovation and tech transfer by working with industry and government and securing a clearer understanding of the goals and missions of research universities. One of its first acts will be to use a symposium entitled “Government, Industry and Academic Partnership to Promote Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi,” scheduled in Abu Dhabi next month, to press for more financial support from industry, government, and individuals.

Maryam Amir Khan, director of the institutional effectiveness and planning support unit at UAE University, says the council would provide a platform for universities from which joint projects, geared to tackle the development imperatives of the nation and the region, could be launched. The council wants to help industry and government to promote a culture of research and innovation and to aid universities in meeting the needs of industry and the economy. It will encourage complementary and cooperative research and academic activities and provide a means for students and staff to work with the public and private sectors.

Khan said the council also would provide a base from which other universities would be able to benefit from the expertise available at UAE University, which has strong research partnerships with research institutes, industry, and universities around the world. “UAE University is a key player in the nation and the region when it comes to higher education and research,” Khan says. “We have renowned faculty from all over the world and well-established research groups in diverse fields. We are sure that these existing partnerships would be of tremendous benefit to other members of the council.”

Source: University World News

“The human hands have this amazing ability to touch something and tell if it’s soft or hard, if it’s wet, or even its temperature,” says Won, who is also director of the Control, Sensor, Network, and Perception Laboratory in Temple’s College of Engineering. “We’re trying to emulate this tactile sensation with a device that will actually quantify this by giving us the mechanical properties of what we are feeling.” The tactile imaging sensor could aid doctors when they feel lesions, lumps, or tumors while conducting physical exams by detecting the size and shape of the lesion or tumor, as well as its elasticity and mobility.

The portable tactile imaging sensor can be attached to any desktop or laptop computer that has a Firewire cable port. Equipped with four LED lights and a camera, the 4.5-inch device has a flexible transparent elastomer cube on the end, into which light is injected. When the doctor feels an irregularity while giving a patient a physical exam, he or she can place the sensor against the skin where the irregularity was felt. The sensor uses the total internal reflection principle, which keeps the injected light within the elastomer cube unless an intrusion from a lesion or tumor changes the contour of the elastomer’s surface, in which case the light will reflect out of the cube. The sensor’s camera then captures the lesion or tumor images caused by the reflected light and they are processed with a novel algorithm developed by the CSNAP Lab to calculate the lesion’s mechanical properties. In addition to being portable and noninvasive, the devise also is inexpensive, with the prototype costing approximately $500.

Source:  Science Daily

The first ring is typically 70 degrees and yellow from sulfur. The next, red from iron, measures 50 degrees to 70 degrees. Finally, there are rings of algae and fungi, he says. It’s an acid-tolerant fungus from one of those outer rings that has Kozubal and colleagues at MSU excited. While working with a 10th-grade science class, Kozubal scooped a bit of algae from the outer ring to see if the class could grow algae for biofuels. While trying to grow the algae, this fungus kept taking over.

Kozubal was amazed that a fungus from an extreme zone in Yellowstone could eat algae. When he took it back to his lab to test its acidity while feeding on glucose, he found the fungus could survive in an acidic habitat with a pH of 6 — an acidity level similar to cow’s milk. When he took it out of the glucose solution and dried, it however, “it just oozed oil,” Kozubal says. “It was taking that glucose and converting it into pretty high percentage lipids. That’s when we really got excited.”

The oil it produced contained a ratio of oleic and steric acids that’s nearly ideal for biofuels. Kozubal and colleagues are working with MSU’s TTO to secure a commercial license and funding for future research into the fungus’ capabilities and applications. Already, companies such as Cargill and BP are showing interest in the fungus, according to Kozubal.

Source: Bozeman Daily Chronicle

What’s on tap for an encore in 2012? First on Innovations’ Chief Chris Coburn’s wish list is likely another exit like last year’s sale of Intelect Medical for $78 million to Boston Scientific. The Clinic’s take from the deal was $28 million. The most obvious exit candidate this year is biomarker company Cleveland HeartLab, which could have exited last year but turned down an offer from an unidentified Massachusetts company. Innovations has plenty of other promising spinoffs, including regenerative medicine firm Juventas Therapeutics, neurostimulation company Autonomic Technologies, and health IT startup Explorys, but 2013 or 2014 seem more likely exit years for those companies.

Another key 2011 accomplishment was a commercialization deal between the Clinic and Maryland health system MedStar Health that calls for the Innovations group to do for MedStar what it already does in Cleveland: help doctors turn ideas for medical advancements into products that bring money back to the hospital. Last April, Innovations hired Tom Thornton, former CEO of the Kansas Bioscience Authority, to strike alliances with other health care institutions to develop medical technologies.

No glance at Cleveland Clinic Innovations would be complete without mentioning Coburn’s baby — the annual Medical Innovations Summit in the fall. The 1,000-attendee summit brings a cadre of business and medical technology A-listers to Cleveland like no other event. Last year’s summit on cardiovascular technology featured speeches from the CEOs of Pfizer, Medtronic, St. Jude Medical, and General Electric. This year, the summit’s focus is orthopedics.

Source:  MedCity News

A UB faculty member since 1989, Holm achieved the SUNY system’s highest rank of SUNY distinguished professor in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. Named executive director of the UB New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences in 2004, he worked diligently to attract high-profile researchers and inventors to Buffalo. By then, Holm and UB colleague Edmund Egan, MD, professor of pediatrics, had developed Infasurf, a lung surfactant that has helped to lower the mortality rate for premature newborns. The Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute named Holm and Egan Pioneers of Science in 2004, and they were awarded the UB Faculty Entrepreneur Award for commercializing the life-saving drug through their Buffalo-based company, ONY Inc.

Robert Genco, UB vice provost and director of UB’s Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach (STOR), said the Bruce Holm Memorial Catalyst Fund will be based in STOR, which works to transform the inventions of UB faculty and students into commercial products and services. The Holm Memorial Catalyst Fund is the kind of resource used by most major universities “to fill the gap between government-supported basic research and private investment needed for commercialization of products and services based on faculty inventions,” Genco says.

The anonymous donation has been made as a match challenge to finance prototype development, proof-of-concept studies, and other research that will advance UB faculty inventions and translate them into useful products and treatments. The fund also will help generate revenue for the start-up companies it supports.

Source: UB News Center

The partnership is expected to use an accelerated model of research, validation, and delivery, with U of L researchers working to validate research findings while InnovateLTC builds infrastructure to support commercialization. “Our partnership complements the university’s current commercialization strategy for the life-sciences sector, while expanding services for products, service models, and technology that benefit both the quality of care and the quality of life as we age,” says InnovateLTC President and CEO John Reinhart. William Pierce, U of L executive vice president for research and innovation, adds that the partnership “would not be confined at all to geriatric medicine” and could include research in areas such as engineering, social work, law, and business.

Source:  Business First

The app, called DriveScribe, provides real-time feedback to the driver; notifies parents instantaneously about traffic violations; and logs driving data online for later review. It also blocks incoming calls, e-mails, and text messages while the vehicle is in operation; a personalized message is sent to those who are attempting to reach the driver. Many of the functions can be disabled — for example, voice commands can be turned off.

“We’re trying to help teens become better drivers, sooner,” says Alec Gorjestani, a research fellow who developed the app and serves as Drive Power’s vice president of technology. “The crash rate for new drivers is very high, especially in the first six months of driving, so we decided to do something about it.”

Source: Twin Cities Business

Officials with CSU Ventures, the university’s tech transfer arm, have filed several provisional patent applications on the processes, which have been published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition (click here).

Chen has found in his laboratory that commercially available organic catalysts applied to small molecules derived from plant biomass are very active and efficient — the reaction achieves completion within a minute — and non-toxic. He also has developed a metal-based catalyst system that produces “stereoregular” polymers that exhibit superior physical and mechanical properties, so they’re more resistant to such factors as temperature, liquids, chemicals, and scratches. The organic process he created could be used to produce commodity plastics for everyday uses such as artificial glass, dental resins, automobile parts, and furniture. His metal-based process would be used to produce high-performance engineering plastic materials that have superb mechanical and physical properties.

Source:  Colorado State University

Rajiv Kulkami, PhD, has joined the University of Kansas as director of its Center for Technology Commercialization. Kulkami previously served as director of business and technology development in the University of Utah’s Technology Commercialization Office. During his 10 years at U-Utah, Kulkami negotiated and completed more than 100 licensing agreements, 28 of which resulted in start-ups based on university research. He will report to Julie Goonewardene, associate vice chancellor for innovation and entrepreneurship in the Office of Research and Graduate Studies, succeeding Jim Baxendale, who plans to transition to a part-time role at KU.

John Turi, JD, has joined Boston University’s Office of Technology Development as licensing director in physical sciences. Turi previously worked as a project manager for Edgewater Technology, a technology management consulting firm, where he led custom development, integration, and implementation engagements for Fortune 100 clients. In addition, Alessandra Pavesio has joined BU as director of the school’s Wallace H. Coulter Translational Research Partnership. Pavesio has more than 20 years of experience in hyaluronan technologies and previously served as vice president of research and development at Anika Therapeutics, Inc., where she was responsible for the design and development of the organization’s research programs in orthobiologics, ophthalmology, and soft tissue repair. Pavesio will have a joint appointment in OTD and the department of biomedical engineering.

Sources: KU News, Innovation America, and BU Biomedical Engineering

Technology Transfer Tactics,
Vol. 6, No. 1, January 2012

• U of Ulster’s “evaluation license” allows a trial period to “test drive” technologies. OpenUlster, a new service recently launched by The University of Ulster, is an approach to the open innovation model that includes an “evaluation license.”
• Should inventors have more control over their discoveries? Would technology transfer get a bolt of adrenaline if university-based inventors had more commercialization pathways to consider for their discoveries? For most institutions with clearcut IP ownership policies — now often more carefully policed after the Stanford v. Roche Supreme Court ruling — the possibilities are limited. But does that necessarily mean your TTO is always in the best position to commercialize a faculty member’s discovery?
• TTOs often walk a fine line when negotiating rights to improvements. Dealing effectively with the rights to IP improvements in your license agreements can be a tricky task, since both your TTO and prospective licensees have good reason to want those rights. If your office is like most, you probably seek to negotiate ownership of all improvements that are dependent on the claims of your licensed seminal patents so that, in the event of early termination, you’ll have improvements available assist in relicensing.
• Consolidation model helps focus tech transfer efforts at U of Arizona. A new technology commercialization center aims to improve tech transfer at the University of Arizona (UA) in Tucson with an innovative approach that consolidates the school’s many offices and divisions related to research commercialization — but that’s not the only goal of the new Tech Launch Arizona.
• Guest Commentary: What is the real value in Real Options?
• Vanderbilt TTO undergoes overhaul, expansion in bid to ramp up results. In the last six months, just about everything has changed at Vanderbilt University’s technology transfer office.

Because the university does not have as many foreign filings as U.S. filings, the TTO lacked the leverage by itself “to encourage our foreign affiliates to strike fixed cost deals for patent costs from end to end in foreign countries,” Anderson explains. To gain that leverage, BYU formed a consortium of law firms and universities to join forces and gain bargaining clout. Now the TTO is able to insist that its U.S. law firms use only selected foreign affiliates who have agreed to the same kind of fixed-fee arrangements used for U.S. patents — and the savings are significant BYU was able to negotiate fixed fees ranging anywhere from $2,000 to $8,000 for filing patent applications in the U.S. “The lower fees are for very small or one-person firms, while the larger ones are on the higher end of the scale,” says Anderson. For the most part the firms in question were open to discussion, he notes. “We have had a couple of firms that refused; we cancelled our business with them and moved on to other firms. Anderson adds that the fixed fee arrangement is mutually beneficial. “We’re able to file more patents than we would have otherwise. And because we have visibility on costs it makes our decisions easier, so we end up patenting much more, and taking a little more risk,” he explains. Because of the increased volume, he notes, the law firms are actually making more in total fees than they were in previous years.

Anderson says that BYU has also negotiated fixed-fee arrangements for handling office actions, which can include responding to written objections; telephone interviews, where several hours are spent discussing claims and objections with a patent examiner; or trips to Washington, DC, where in-person interviews are conducted. All in all, he says, “it used to cost from $20,000 to $70,000 to prosecute a patent in the U.S., whereas now it’s really hard to go above the  $20,000 total.” That has allowed BYU to expand its patent applications from about 20 a year to 80 a year for the past few years. “Despite that fact, our total overall budget has only gone up about 25%,” Anderson notes.

Early this year, the TTO turned its attention to costs associated with foreign affiliates and discovered that those expenses were through the roof. “In fact, they were higher than for the U.S. law firm that was really doing all the heavy lifting.” Following an approach similar to what he had adopted with the U.S. firms, Anderson identified some of the best firms in each country and negotiated fixed fees with them. “We were able to cut costs between 50% and 70% over what we had previously paid,” he reports. The fixed price arrangements have been struck with foreign law firms in 40 countries. And BYU’s U.S. law firms must now use only those foreign affiliates.

However, Anderson concedes, BYU would not have had enough clout by itself to convince the foreign affiliates to agree to these fixed fee arrangements. “I realized that in order to get enough numbers in a given country, I needed to consolidate my business with a number of other universities and law firms,” he says. The vehicle he created to do that, the Utah Law Consortium of universities and Utah law firms, now consolidates most of the group’s business at one law firm in each country. “The group is able to file between 20 and 30 new applications in each country per year, and the group then gets the best pricing and fixed rates for start to finish for an application — no matter how difficult or easy the prosecution may be,” Anderson explains. A detailed article on the BYU strategy appears in the January issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the full article, along with more than four years of archived best practices and case studies, CLICK HERE.

Lehrer’s article examines the work of Stanford professor of medicine John Ioannidis, who shows that many papers published in elite scientific journals simply do not hold up. Problems in reporting science have a direct bearing on technology transfer, Barnett says, since “one can’t transfer technology if, in fact, it isn’t actually technology that’s any good. Nor can one expect companies to jump up and invest in something just because it has been published in a nice journal.”

The problems with scientific research point to a similar sort of fiction that hampers technology transfer, Barnett argues. “Models” are little more than arrangements of the details we have chosen to focus on, he says. Models do not provide causes, but rather provide narrative substitutes for cause. Unfortunately, Barnett points out, tech transfer models don’t take into account factors like luck. 

“The huge problem comes when we mistake models for reality, when we think that the sense of order, of process, reduced to a neat diagram, actually represents knowledge about the world, about the complex systems by which new things come into the world,” Barnett writes. “The worst comes about when universities implement policies to try to force the world to conform to a heuristic, such as a patent licensing strategy. It just doesn’t work this way.” 

Source:  Research Enterprise

That’s where an effective outsourcing strategy can help, as a growing number of TTOs are discovering. When structured and managed effectively, outsourcing can assist in getting more IP assessed, developed, and licensed while freeing up staff time and helping solidify faculty relations. And it can save money too — lots of money — by replacing high-cost vendors with less expensive offshoring options that maintain quality while stretching your budget dollars. On February 28th you can learn the ins and outs of outsourcing success from a team of experts in this practical distance learning program: How to Outsource and Offshore TTO Activities for Huge Savings and Efficiency Gains. Our program faculty will share their outsourcing success stories and provide you with usable takeaways you can implement immediately to start chipping away at your backlog and bring more technologies to the marketplace. For complete program and faculty details or to register, CLICK HERE.

AND DON’T MISS THESE UPCOMING WEBINARS:

• Thursday, January 26th: Life Under AIA: Anticipating and Surviving Post Grant Challenges
• Wednesday, February 15th: Licensee Red Flags: 12 Critical Signs that Should Trigger an Audit

Barth and colleague Krista Rodgers discovered that a short course of systemic ibudilast administered more than a month after concussion injury reversed post-TBI anxiety in rats for a three-month period following treatment. “While we had initially observed impressive reduction of anxiety behavior when ibudilast was administered just prior to head injury, we were, frankly, surprised that a few days of treatment so long after injury could provide notable efficacy for up to three months thereafter, Barth says. “This finding suggests that post-traumatic anxiety in humans may have a strong physiological basis in neuro-inflammation and that the ongoing neuropathy may be treatable with drugs like ibudilast that attenuate and perhaps interrupt the brain’s inflammatory response.”

In their research, Barth and colleagues have hypothesized that unchecked activation of glial cells in the brain may contribute to some of the post-TBI disorders. Ibudilast is a selective inhibitor of macrophage-migration inhibitory factor (MIF) and certain phosphodiesterases with well-recognized activity as an attenuator of glial cell activation.

Source: NASDAQ.com

Dennis Leonard, an innovation consultant for the UAB Research Foundation, is working with Joel Dobbs, an instructor of the UAB Business School, and Steve Ceulemans of the Birmingham Business Alliance on the i2i initiative. Ceulemans, the former director of technology commercialization for the New Orleans BioInnovation Center, joined the BBA last September as vice president of innovation and technology.

Ceulemans says the i2i concept is not exactly new, but Birmingham’s approach to it is. “One advantage we have is our ability to execute,” he points out. “We now have somebody with a direct tie to the IT portfolio, somebody with a direct tie to entrepreneurial capacity building, somebody with a direct tie to the business community. Spanning that whole ecosystem from a practical perspective is tough to do.”

The group is already studying business start-up opportunities based on UAB research. Among the ideas under consideration are a sports safety product, a product to keep people safe from severe weather, and a cybersecurity product. Another idea combines radiology and engineering to create a novel surgical tool.

Source: al.com

To simplify: Revenue – Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) = Gross Profit (also called Gross Margin or sometimes “Net Revenue”) - Operating Costs = Profit. When Suster examines an income (or profit and loss) statement, he starts with the revenue line. “If you had two companies each with $100 million in ‘earnings,’ or profits, they might have vastly different prospects for the future,” he points out. “One company might be growing its revenue at 50% per year and the other might be growing at 5% per year. Assuming they both had the same net profit margins (profit/revenue) then the former company would be much better off at the end of the year. So while the simplest way that people often evaluate stocks is by P/E ratios (price-to-earnings), one also needs to look at other metrics such as the PEG (price-to-earnings-growth).”

When Suster evaluates companies that already have revenue, he seeks to understand the revenue line in greater detail. “What makes up revenue?” he asks. “Is it one product line or multiple? Do 20% of the customers make 80% of the revenue or do the top three customers represent 80% of the revenue?” Suster also tries to understand how the company prices its product, how its competitors price, and what its pricing expectations are for the future. “Fast early growth in a market is often eroded when competition gets fierce and prices are forced down due to competition,” he points out.

Source: Both Sides of the Table

Traditionally, cancer detection focuses on the identifying cancer cells. UND’s technique relies on a new approach, which looks at biomarkers, or the byproducts of these cells. In this case, it’s a trio of proteins found in fluids in the breasts of women who aren’t nursing, according to Sauter. That fluid can be extracted with a kind of breast pump, so the procedure is noninvasive. Each of the proteins tends to be present when there are cancer cells in the breast, but individually they do not guarantee that cancer cells are present. When the three proteins appear together, however, there’s a greater chance that cancer cells are present.

UND researchers have begun clinical tests. Neomatrix is providing funding to begin large-scale testing that could validate whether the technique is ready for the FDA approval process.

Source: Grand Forks Herald

The center also develops its own concepts and provides funding to advance these ideas. It uses the money to help clinicians construct prototypes like SKOTEE. “We help build value and take out risk in the early phase of these start-up companies, and we can provide the connection with the clinical world,” explains Lars Oddsson, the center’s director of research. “That’s the expertise we bring to the table.”

Researchers and therapists at the Sister Kenny Rehabilitation Institute conceived the idea for SKOTEE two years ago. It’s crucial for patients to repeat physical therapy exercises at home so their brains are retrained to use those muscles, but it can be tough to convince patients to follow through. SKOTEE could solve that problem, says Matthew White, one of the occupational therapists who came up with the idea, because people can develop an emotional bond with a robot similar to that with a household pet. Besides nudging patients to do their workouts, SKOTEE could have other features, such as letting patients play music or read electronic books on its system.

The research center helped bring SKOTEE to life with an initial budget of $5,000 to $10,000, provided graduate students to help build a prototype, and paid for the materials. Several patients from the Sister Kenny Rehabilitation Institute tested a model of SKOTEE this month. Based on user feedback, the center will determine which features will need to be refined or added.

Source:  StarTribune.com

• Royalty Rates for Technology, 4th Edition
• Royalty Rates for Technology: Medical Devices and Diagnostics Edition
• Royalty Rates for Technology: Computers and Communications Edition
• Royalty Rates for Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology, 7th Edition
• Royalty Rates for Trademarks & Copyrights, 4th Edition
• Royalty Rates in Copyright Agreements: Guide to Full-Text Copyright Agreements
• Royalty Rates in Biotech: Guide to Full-Text Licensing Agreements
• Licensing Trade Secrets: Overview and Sample Agreements

Its start-ups — including Lee’s company, which uses human stem cells to better predict how new drugs might affect patients’ hearts — receive free office space, legal support, and guidance from venture capitalists and veteran tech entrepreneurs. “I really enjoy it,” says LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke, who graduated from Stanford two decades ago and for the past year and a half has been volunteering to support entrepreneurship courses at the engineering school. He’s now mentoring two StartX teams: one that uses social networking software to help professionals stay in touch, and another that helps students get into top colleges by connecting them to current students at those schools. “I wanted to work with companies where I thought my background would be helpful,” he says.

StartX is the brainchild of Cameron Teitelman, 23, who graduated from Stanford in June but launched the program while still an undergraduate. The idea began when Teitelman went looking to build his own company as a sophomore. The Essential Card aimed to give Stanford students discounts at local stores and restaurants, but Teitelman found the process frustrating despite the university’s famed entrepreneurial streak. “There are a lot of resources all over the place, but it’s really fragmented,” he said. “What was missing was a network of mentors.”

After a year of buildup and brainstorming, StartX rolled out its first three-month session in summer 2010. Since then, 32 companies have gone through the program — representing fields as diverse as cleantech, biotechnology and gaming — and 13 more are enrolled. Unlike many incubators or accelerators that have sprung up around Silicon Valley, StartX is a nonprofit and takes no ownership stake in the start-ups chosen to participate. Portfolio companies also receive free web server space and, during the summer sessions, living stipends.

Source:  San Jose Mercury News

The five-month process matches a UNR or DRI faculty member with a mentor from the business community. They’ll work to find research areas that have the greatest relevance to industry, talk over those possibilities with companies in the field, and look for ways to fund research. It’s a model that’s found success at schools such as Stanford, where university research has played a key role in driving the creation of the Silicon Valley technology cluster.

Much of the day-to-day work of the program in northern Nevada will be handled by the graduate students who work with the researchers and by interns from the master’s degree program in business administration at UNR, says Ryan Heck, a patent attorney who serves as director of the TTO for UNR and DRI. The reliance on MBA interns and graduate students, Heck says, is intended to reduce the time commitments for busy faculty members and private-sector executives, and it gives MBA students real-world experience in project-management. The TTO also is looking to build a wider network of industry experts who are willing to review brief technology summaries and provide very brief feedback on the potential value of the technology in the marketplace. “This serves a real, legitimate need that we have,” he says. “All we want from them is some ideas.”

Source: Northern Nevada Business Weekly

Both institutes know something about desert climates — Reno gets about 7.5 inches of precipitation annually while Amman receives 12 inches — and researchers from both institutes have done much work on water conservation technologies. But like DRI, the Jordanian institute also is studying a wide range of promising technologies ranging from clean energy production to environmental monitoring. Like the DRI staff, the Jordanian researchers are eager to find commercial applications for their work. The joint effort is drawing close attention from the experts responsible for developing new jobs and new companies in northern Nevada.

Like DRI — the environmental research arm of the Nevada System of Higher Education, which receives only a portion of its financial support directly from the government — the Jordanian institute relies on research grants for the bulk of its funding. Development of commercial products from the research promises to generate new streams of licensing and royalties revenues for both institutes at the same time that it creates new jobs in the private sector.

DRI recently designated the Center for Unique Business Enterprises — the CUBE — in downtown Reno as its incubator for new companies that commercialize technologies developed in its laboratories. As a next step, the CUBE is developing a list of potential joint development and commercial opportunities. From there, the international team will select one or two for a focused commercialization effort.

Source: Northern Nevada Business Weekly

“What started as a successful experiment in wildfire restoration could develop into an innovative platform to improve seedling establishment in areas ranging from turfgrass to important horticultural and agronomic crops, especially in water limited areas,” says Stan Kostka, director of innovation and new business development at Aquatrols. “This technology could make strides in unchartered territories including the ability to sow grass and seeds that are hard to establish in water repellent soils, the ability to repair fire affected wilderness, and the ability to improve stand establishment in soils that crust. We look forward to seeing what it can do.”

Source:  Lawn & Landscape

Black silicon refers to the apparent color of the surface of a silicon wafer after it has been etched with nanoscale pores. The black color results from the absence of reflected light from the porous wafer surface. Several benefits result from this manipulation of the wafers. First, the NREL estimates that it reduces cell processing costs by 4% to 8%. Efficiencies at peak solar exposure are a little lower, but “the black silicon prevents reflection of low-angle morning and afternoon sunlight far better, which means a jump in photovoltaic efficiency of at least 1 percentage point can be achieved,” according to the NREL. In the end, that means overall savings in solar cell manufacturing of 1% to 3%, the lab says.

Natcore says the black silicon technology developed by NREL will be particularly effective when combined with its process to “passivate” the increased area of exposed silicon that results from boosting the light absorption of the cells. “The combined NREL-Natcore technologies will reduce cost by eliminating the need for thermal oxidation,” says Chuck Provini, Natcore’s president and CEO. “And they’ll increase output by enabling cells to be more productive throughout all daylight hours.”

Source: Earth Techling

More than 900 programmers and image processing experts from around the world have pre-registered to compete in the challenge. Results are expected to be revealed by February 16, 2012.

Source: The White House

Carl Schramm has stepped down as president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation to “return to scholarship and business.” Kauffman trustee Benno Schmidt was appointed interim president, effective January 1. Schramm served for a decade. Under his leadership, the organization revamped Kauffman Scholars (its program to mentor budding entrepreneurs), created Global Entrepreneurship Week, and became a respected source for research on entrepreneurship and its implications for growth and social welfare.

Sources: UB Reporter and The Kansas City Star

1. Mine for the gems, discard the coal. Use cost-effective, consistent processes to screen inventions and quickly down-select to those with the highest market potential. Focus your efforts and resources there.
2. Stop reacting, start proacting. Don’t wait for your licensing prospects to come to you. Create and implement proactive, strategic, efficient action plans to go get them and secure a deal.
3. Remember the AMMO in marketing. Props to Howie Jacobson for his recent post on the Fast Company blog about speaking “Doglish” (click here), Schoppe writes. “Always remember your audience, message, mechanism, and outcome,” she says.
4. Streamline and standardize. Create clear, straightforward processes, procedures, and rules and post them online. Use standard/template agreements judiciously.
5. Let go of your fear. Surprisingly, one of the biggest obstacles to tech transfer success has nothing to do with process, skills, or funding. It’s the fear of making a bad decision, which usually leads to making no decision. There are ways to make the best decision possible. So do those things, and make it!

Source: Fuentek

Juan Sanchez, UT’s vice president of research, says he instructed Miller in December to divest his interests in three start-up companies that he had co-founded with UT faculty members and graduate students. Miller did divest his holdings in the three companies — Wibole, Graphea Inc. and Ultimor — but resigned sometime after that discussion. There was no active conflict of interest with Miller’s involvement with the companies because they had not yet licensed technology from UT. However, Miller “was setting up a scenario in which he would be negotiating with himself, and that would have been a conflict of interest, which we would not allow,” Sanchez explains. “The resignation was his call. I would have liked him to remain as chief commercialization officer, but he chose not to.”

Sanchez has asked Dan Sharp, associate director of the commercialization office, to serve as the interim director until a permanent replacement for Miller is named.

Source:  Statesman.com

By readily identifying licensee red flags, you can avoid that risk and recoup lost royalties, as well as optimize the efficiency of your audit process by focusing your attention on those licensees with the greatest chance of finding errors, omissions, and underpayments. That’s why Technology Transfer Tactics’ Distance Learning Division has teamed up with a nationally respected expert to host a 60-minute webinar, coming February 15th, that will be jam-packed with proven tactics and strategies: Licensee Red Flags: 12 Critical Signs that Should Trigger an Audit. Attendees will hear royalty audit expert Daniel Burns, president of DBA, share his top 12 signs that should trigger the audit process — as well as the rationale behind them and the critical audit procedures needed to ferret out mistakes and missing dollars. For complete details and to register, CLICK HERE.

ALSO COMING SOON:

• Tuesday, January 17: Transform Your TTO Into an Economic Development Engine
• Thursday, January 26: Life Under AIA: Anticipating and Surviving Post Grant Challenges

Universities are in a strong position to realize the commercial value in their technologies and expertise via the apps market, Hayward says, but the predominantly patent-driven approach to university tech transfer may leave research-based software innovations on the shelf. In contrast, earlier this year Aberystwyth’s tech transfer staff was recognized by the IP office for a project about the effective use of copyright and trademarks. The award recognized the approach developed by Aberystwyth to protecting and commercializing IP relating to software created by university researchers. The team is next expected to work on a project to determine how a university can increase the number of software innovations identified and evaluated across its research base, harness the full potential of copyright and trademarks for protecting software products, and deploy internal design and marketing resources when translating research into apps.

Source: The Guardian

“Mobile applications are a relatively new breed of technology that requires a different approach to commercialization and one that is built on speed to market,” says the OTC’s Michael Halbrook, who is the program manager in charge of much of the school’s IT and software IP. “Led by the growing number of mobile devices — smart phones, tablets, and so on — developers at Purdue are creating a number of new mobile apps to address the demand from users for more mobile tools.”

These new apps, he continues, require a different approach to IP management. “Unlike the traditional methods to commercialization such as licensing or creating a new company, apps are marketed mainly through virtual stores such as the Apple iTunes or Android outlets,” says Halbrook. “This program, which is managed by the OTC, facilitates the virtual commercialization of a new wave of intellectual property — mobile applications.” A detailed article on Purdue’s app development program appears in the December 2011 issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the full article, along with more than four years of archived best practices and tech transfer success strategies, CLICK HERE. 

What makes the achievement even more remarkable is that the U of U only spent $450 million on research in 2010 — one-third of MIT’s $1.4-billion budget. Much of the credit is due to the university’s Technology Venture Development (TVD) office, created in 2005 to coordinate all commercialization efforts across campus. It all boils down to investability, says Jack Brittain, TVD’s vice president. “The key difference for us is our understanding that it’s a sequence that involves papers, patents and products. And the distance from patents to projects is huge. There’s a lot that has to happen. And most universities stop at the patent point.”

The TVD office created a process around start-ups and commercialization that can be applied to all kinds of new companies. The university was persuaded to create some small grants programs that fund proof-of-concept prototypes to make sure that the technology works. Proof-of-concept grants go up to $5,000, with an average of $1,500, Brittain says. If the technology pans out, the project receives an additional grant of $35,000-$40,000 to conduct further product development. “It’s all milestoning,” he points out. “You meet the next milestone and you’re eligible for a certain amount of money. We’re not doing huge money. Our philosophy here is ‘fail fast, fail cheap.’”

Source: BusinessNewsDaily.com

1. Regarding the hyper-hyped “first inventor to file” replacing of “first to invent,” the number of situations in which two different parties file patent applications on the same or substantially the same invention, and the second to file obtains valid dominant patent claims, is miniscule — now less than 20 a year, according to Morgan. Cases involving invention “derivation” are a small percentage of even that miniscule number.
2. The most significant AIA changes, which will affect almost every patent applicant, are in the definitions of what counts as prior art. The AIA provides a considerable simplification (albeit with a few ambiguities). Also, most prior art will now become instant “bars-to-patentability.” U.S. application foreign priority filing dates and foreign public disclosure dates both becoming U.S. prior art dates will provide a significant prior art increase.
3. Delaying filing patent applications after publicly disclosing one’s invention is foolishly dangerous now, and will remain so. It will also continue to destroy foreign patent rights. There is a [sole remaining] one year “grace period” for doing that, but that grace period is ambiguous as to its disclosure extent requirements and effect.
4. The AIA significantly increases the value of trade secrecy protection (instead of or even in addition to patenting) for any inventions that can be kept secret while being commercially exploited. There is potential dual IP protection from the AIA elimination of “best mode” defenses.
5. The ability to eliminate any inequitable conduct defense before patent litigation is provided in the new “Supplemental Examination.”
6. Ending the “false marking suits” plague and the naming of numerous defendants in the same patent suit [to avoid venue transfers] is already accomplished. Also, there is a new “virtual” marking system that really ought to be used.

            Source: Patently-O

Male academics are much more likely than their female counterparts to start companies to exploit their inventions, studies show. That’s a problem, because if female academics aren’t building businesses based on their research, they aren’t benefiting from the rewards that high-growth, high-tech companies emerging from universities provide.

Why aren’t women starting university spinoffs at the same rate as men? Researchers have posited several explanations, including the relatively small number of senior female academics in science and engineering, greater exposure of male academics to the business community, less commercially relevant research by female professors, and greater personal and professional responsibilities for women academics. While these factors may all play a role in explaining the paucity of spinoffs founded by women, Shane suggests another factor at play: The attitudes of technology licensing officers on university campuses.

Shane and colleagues conducted an experiment with 239 technology licensing officers at 88 leading research universities. They randomly assigned a male name and picture to an identical invention disclosure and inventor description to half of the sample and a female name and picture to the other half. Then they asked the technology licensing officers: “If the inventor wanted to start a company to commercialize this technology, how much would you try to dissuade the inventor?” (The scale ranged from one, meaning “not at all,” to five, meaning “as much as I could.”) Even though the only difference between the two groups of invention disclosures was that one came from an inventor with a female name and picture and the other from an inventor with a male name and picture, the licensing officers were significantly more likely to report that they would dissuade the female inventor from starting a company.

Don’t just blame the male technology licensing officers, Shane says. The experiment showed that the results held for both male and female tech transfer officers. And most licensing officers weren’t aware of their preferences, revealing a hidden bias.

Source: Businessweek

The severe weather sensors are part of a technology commercialization “spin in” program at USU. The school also is busy creating tech startups, “but we don’t see that as our bread and butter,” says Robert T. Behunin, USU’s vice president of commercialization and regional development. “Our focus at USU is ‘fewer, deeper,’” he adds. “Full-scale commercialization efforts at USU may result in fewer companies spun-off from university-developed technologies, but those companies to come out of USU have industry support, by way of partnerships and capital raised.”

USU partners with local, national, and international businesses, where the school helps the companies to research, develop and then commercialize their own technology ideas, resulting in partnerships and research dollars “spun in” to the university portfolio. “We are engaging industry and our other stakeholders and asking, ‘What is it that industry needs to move forward, either economically or technologically?’” Behunin explains. “At the end of the day, the result has been the establishment of significant partnerships where USU is able to leverage its research dollars, while our commercial partners receive the research and development they need to take their intellectual property to market.”

Source: Cache Valley Daily

• Increase your commercialization success rate
• Objectively assess and triage your technologies
• Invest your patent, R&D, and marketing budgets more productively
• Avoid the high costs of non-performing technology assets
• Take the guesswork and subjectivity out of investment decisions
• Justify your decisions to faculty and preserve faculty relationships
• Keep politics out of your decision-making
• Back a high percentage of winning technologies

The affordable TechAdvance tool has been carefully tested over years of development and is designed to provide a consistent, organized, and objective system for investing your limited resources in technologies with greatest chance for commercial success. It is available as both a print workbook and online module. For complete details, CLICK HERE.

Members of the G3Box team were challenged in one of their courses to determine a way to repurpose the numerous shipping containers that have been discarded at ports around the world. They immediately began to think of ways to turn the containers into something that would help people. The ASU team came up with the idea of turning the containers into portable maternity clinics that could be shipped to countries that have extremely high maternal mortality rates. The team began plans to refurbish the containers, adding ventilation, insulation, power, and potable water. From these plans, G3Box, a “more-than-profit” company aimed at generating global good, was formed.

G3Box is currently working out of ASU’s Edson student accelerator based in ASU SkySong, Scottsdale’s Innovation Center. The Edson accelerator provides funding, mentoring, and office space that enables students to advance their ventures.

Source: ASU News

Source: Bill Payne & Associates

Central to AIM technology is the artificial antigen-presenting cell (aAPC), developed in the laboratory of Jonathan Schneck, MD, professor of pathology, oncology, and medicine, and director of the Human Immunology Program at the Institute for Cellular Engineering in Hopkins School of Medicine. Natural antigen-presenting cells, or APCs, direct the immune system cells in attacks on targeted antigens and cells. However, under certain disease conditions, APCs can be damaged, absent or inactive. The AIM technology holds potential for use in immunotherapy because aAPCs can be engineered to orchestrate the immune system in a highly specific attack.

NexImmune was founded by the faculty inventors of the AIM technology at Hopkins and a team of entrepreneurs affiliated with Noble Life Sciences in Gaithersburg, MD, where the company is located.

Source:  Johns Hopkins

Bentley, 40, arrived at Vanderbilt from the technology commercialization arm of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, where he was director of commercialization. Under his watch, the renamed Center for Technology Transfer and Commercialization at Vanderbilt already has added a half-dozen staffers, including more licensing professionals and its first director of licensing.

“We’re turning to more of a market-driven strategy,” Bentley says. “The perception of the office has been we’re here to help people get patents and secure intellectual property protection. The real goal of an office like this is to help inventors achieve their goal of seeing their technologies reach the marketplace. We’ve developed new processes and procedures to facilitate that progression of the technology from an early-stage concept to a final product. That involves increasing the types of relationships we have with industry seeking sponsored research activities here, developing internal processes to make it easier for faculty to work through all of the elements that are going to make them successful, and developing prototypes of their technology.”

For example, Bentley calls the pharmaceutical industry’s downsizing “a tremendous opportunity for academia. Industry is coming back to us not necessarily for technologies, but for research collaborations, and we need to be positioned to help cultivate and develop those.”

Source:  The Tennessean

The technology was collaboratively between the research groups of Mark Prausnitz, a Regents’ professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Henry Edelhauser, a professor in the department of ophthalmology at Emory School of Medicine. “We expect that targeting drug delivery within the eye will be helpful because we should be able to concentrate drugs at the disease sites where they need to act and keep them away from other locations,” Prausnitz explains. “This could reduce side effects and possibly also decrease the dose required.”

The technology uses a hollow micron-scale needle to inject therapeutics into the suprachoroidal space located between the outer surface of the eye — known as the sclera — and the choroid, a deeper layer that provides nutrients to the rest of the eye. Preclinical research has demonstrated that fluid can flow between the two layers, where it can spread out to the entire eye, including structures such as the retina that are now difficult to reach. The Georgia Tech-Emory team has demonstrated that the technique can be used to deliver nanoparticles and microparticles to specific parts of the eye.

Source: R&D Mag

Small molecule drug innovators also have relied more heavily on patent protection because biologic drugs have a different term of exclusivity. Hatch-Waxman gives small molecule drugs only five years of exclusivity, while the BPCIA gives biologic drugs 12 years. Patent law provisions and drug regulatory law have made patent litigation the principal battle ground between innovator and generic drug makers for a generation, Noonan writes. None of these advantages exist in the biosimilar approval pathway specified under the BPCIA.

But there is another conventional purpose for biologic drug patenting: protecting start-up companies early in the development cycle. In this regard, patents continue to serve their purpose of providing exclusivity for further development stage and in prohibiting larger, better-funded companies from expropriating early-stage technology. Patents also satisfy the requirements imposed on universities under the Bayh-Dole Act and enable federally funded grantees to reap the benefits of licensing their technology.

These advantages are unlikely to change even for biologic drugs, Noonan says. But the expected de-emphasis on patent protection for later-stage development can be expected to change the relative importance of patents in the two stages. Such de-emphasis also will change where the valuation in biologic drugs may lie, because there will be a relatively greater advantage in optimizing cell lines and other process parameters (which even today rarely benefit from patenting) than in patents on the biologic drugs per se. “Thirty years of deal-making and negotiating behavior between small companies and their larger brethren will be impacted, probably not in a way that will inure to the benefit of the start-ups,” he writes. “While patents will remain essential to early-stage companies, their diminished value to larger partners (and the concomitantly greater value of the contributions of such companies) should also diminish the valuation of such deals.”

Source: Patent Docs

In particular, the pilot program modifies the Office’s current missing parts practice — which permits an applicant to pay the filing fees and submit an executed oath or declaration after the filing of a nonprovisional application within a two-month time period that is extendable for an additional five months on payment of extension of time fees — so that applicants can file a nonprovisional application with at least one claim within the 12-month statutory period after the provisional application has been filed and then have a 12-month period to decide whether the nonprovisional application should be completed by paying the required surcharge and search, examination, and excess claim fees.

Applicants who wish to participate in the pilot program must file a nonprovisional application within 12 months of the filing date of a provisional application, directly claim the benefit of the provisional application, and submit a certification and request to participate in the program with the nonprovisional application.

The pilot program is not without its drawbacks, Zuhn points out. For example, the form for requesting participation in the program (PTO/SB/421) outlines the patent term adjustment (PTA) effects of participation in the program, stating that “any patent term adjustment accrued by applicant based on certain administrative delays by the USPTO is offset by a reduction for failing to reply to a notice by the USPTO within three months.  See 37 CFR 1.704(b).  Thus, if applicant replies to a notice to file missing parts more than three months after the mailing date of the notice, the additional time that applicant takes to reply to the notice will be treated as an offset to any positive PTA accrued by the applicant.”

Under the pilot program, nonprovisional applications still are published according to the existing 18-month publication provisions.

Source: Patent Docs

The TAD works in conjunction with materials transfer agreements (MTAs), which govern the transfer of tangible research materials between two organizations, and they define the rights of the material provider and the recipient with respect to the materials. For its first release, TAD is focused on MTAs between the intramural laboratories at NIH and universities or nonprofit research organizations that wish to obtain NIH materials. Eventually, TAD will be able to accommodate materials from these external organizations into the NIH intramural program.

TAD offers material requesters and providers 24/7 access to the status of in-process MTAs, allows users to track metrics on numbers and types of MTAs executed by their institution, and allows users to view comments and the full history of each transaction. To register a nonprofit or academic organization in the system, contact TAD user support at NIHTADSupport@mail.nih.gov. The TAD homepage is https://techtransferagreements.nih.gov.

Source: NIH News

The change comes after more than a year of analysis and consultation with stakeholders and colleagues and includes a seven-point plan for reinvigoration of IP practices:

1. Create an Office of Technology Management from the Industrial Research Office and the Intellectual Property Office.
2. Spur growth in corporately funded research with more flexible IP policies.
3. Manage master agreements in a way that provides real value to the corporation and the university by building end-to-end partnerships.
4. Create a culture of entrepreneurship at Penn State by creating more trust, ownership, and excitement among the faculty.
5. Raise revenue by aggressively marketing existing Penn State IP.
6. Rename and explain the conflict of interest policy to make it easier for faculty to understand and adhere to the policy.
7. Co-locate the new Small Business Development Center with the Office of Technology Management, Office of Sponsored Programs, Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Central and Northern Pennsylvania, Centre County Industrial Development Corp., incubators, and Innovation Park.

Source: Penn State Live

George Megaw, director of the office of technology licensing at City of Hope, says all but a few million dollars of that income comes from the so-called “Cabilly patents,” named after immunologist Shmuel Cabilly. A researcher at City of Hope in the 1980s, Cabilly was awarded patents for recombinant antibody production technology in a joint project with Genentech. That technology has since been the basis for more than 20 commercial drugs, including Herceptin, Rituxan, Traceba, Raptiva, and Xolair. The massive royalty payments stemming from the licensing deals around these patents have enabled what Megaw describes as a “small, niche institution” like City of Hope to become a huge player in tech transfer.

The top 10 tech transfer programs among hospitals and research institutions in the AUTM survey, ranked by 2010 licensing income, include:

1. City of Hope National Medical Center & Beckman Research Institute, $202 million
2. Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, $139 million
3. Massachusetts General Hospital, $77 million
4. Cleveland Clinic, $36 million
5. Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, $22 million
6. Brigham & Women’s Hospital, $20 million
7. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, $14 million
8. Wistar Institute, $13 million
9. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, $13 million
10. Children’s Hospital Boston, $13 million

Source: MED City News

While the changes won’t take effect until September 2012, tech transfer professionals and IP practitioners need to quickly get up to speed on the details of this potentially damaging provision. That’s why our Distance Learning Division has teamed up with attorney experts Michael T. Siekman and Ed Walsh from the Wolf Greenfield IP Law Firm to present this hour-long educational webinar: Life Under AIA: Anticipating and Surviving Post Grant Challenges. Join us Thursday, January 26, 2012, when Mr. Siekman and Mr. Walsh will provide a detailed review of the post-grant review provisions, their likely impact, remaining uncertainties as the USPTO deals with implementation, and strategies to begin planning now for both patent drafting and responding effectively to post-grant actions. For complete program details and to register, CLICK HERE.

ALSO, COMING IN JANUARY

• Wednesday, January 18th: Transform Your TTO Into an Economic Development Engine

1. Hire the interns to start at the beginning of the summer. With this approach, the interns are full-time staff for several months and working efficiently for the TTO once the school year begins, when they have other distractions. Select students with technical backgrounds that match the institution’s technology portfolio.

2. Pay interns an hourly wage. “You only get the students for one semester, so you are wasting a lot of time training them for only a few months of productivity,” Schoppe says. “Partial credit is not enough to get a real commitment from them, and you are likely to be their lowest priority. If they are doing it as part of a business plan class, they will have a vested interest in the outcome and that will taint the triage process.”

3. Use a formal and well-defined technology screening process. If students perform the tech triage for you, you need consistency, and you can monitor quality without a lot of retraining, Schoppe says.

4. Conduct extensive training and mentoring. Formalizing the process enables interns to become independent, efficient, and effective screeners.

5. Establish four-intern teams. Groups of this size can crank out several screenings per day, according to Schoppe. When interns work individually or in pairs, expect them to take 15 to 20 hours to conduct a single screening.

6. After interns conduct the leg work, have their findings reviewed by pros. In Schoppe’s experience, Fuentek consultants reviewed the reports and outcomes of interns, and TTO tech managers used the reports to make their final disposition decisions.

7. Require tech managers to discuss each screening’s findings and disposition decision with the inventor. “This was time-consuming but was essential for building positive relationships with faculty,” Schoppe says, adding that a well-defined process increases faculty buy-in.

Source: Fuentek

Cornell, one of the only top private research universities in the country not located in an urban area, saw expansion into New York as a necessary component of its future ambitions and was willing to go to greater lengths, invest more money, and better conform to what the city wanted. “In the end, the proposal that wanted it the most, and that fit the best with what New York is all about, was the one that won,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said during the announcement at the Weill Cornell Medical College, an earlier Cornell beachhead in Manhattan.

The campus could have broad ramifications for all players involved. For New York City, the campus has the potential to develop a high-tech industry that many say is underrepresented in the city’s economy. For Technion, the campus gives the Israeli institute, widely credited with transforming the country from an agrarian economy to a high-tech capital, a chance to demonstrate its quality on the international scene. Finally, victory in the competition and potential success at the new campus could help cement Cornell as one of the major academic players in the high-tech industry.

Source:  Inside Higher Ed

According to Timothy Slottow, U-M executive vice president and CFO, the Michigan Investments in New Technology Start-Ups (MINTS) program — the first of its kind — will not only yield competitive investment results but also make university start-ups more visible. In October, Coleman said U-M actually loses significant investment returns by not investing earlier in its own start-ups sooner. “Analysis shows that if we had, in fact, invested in these start-ups, the returns would have been healthy, the returns would have been competitive with our VC portfolio,” she says. “Simply put, University of Michigan start-ups are a good financial opportunity.”

Source: AnnArbor.com

Access BridgeGap expects to fund three to five companies per year and to deploy $75 million over the first few years, according to Behr. “Commercially promising innovations being developed in research institutions and in young start-ups are often deemed too early for partnering by industry or for investment by traditional venture capital,” Bronstein adds. “Our focus is to translate early-stage science into commercially relevant products and companies.”

Source: The Sacramento Bee

• Considers all of the variables that determine IP value;
• Calculates discrete dollar and percentage amounts for IP value variables;
• Calculates IP competitive advantage relative to competing IP;
• Quantifies technical, market and intellectual property risk associated with IP;
• Equalizes return on investment in IP for parties engaged in an IP exchange.

Created by nationally recognized IP law expert Ted Hagelin, the CAV Software yields clear and logical valuation results at an extremely low price when compared with other products or typical consulting fees. The pricing is designed to make valuation expertise more widely available and allow any organization, regardless of budget, to conduct valuation analyses in-house. Under a special agreement with 2Market Information, the CAV system is available for only $350. For complete details and an online demo, CLICK HERE >>>

Initial commitments from ULR contract issuers have an aggregate targeted market value in excess of $250 million, with numerous additional company portfolios in various stages of the submission process, according to Gerard Pannekoek, IPXI president and CEO. In addition to founding corporate members Philips and Com-Pac International, Rutgers University, Northwestern University, and the University of Utah have joined as university founding members, with the right to serve on the IPXI rules committee and to commit to sponsor ULR contracts on the Exchange.

Chicago-based IPXI, the world’s first financial exchange focused on IP, is designed to provide global corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises, universities, and public and private labs with price transparency and enhanced efficiency in nonexclusive technology licensing.

Source: MarketWatch

Organizations can post available technologies on the Licensable Technology database at no cost. LicensableTechnology.com provides users with regular statistics from its database, detailing click-through rates on each technology and offering a measurable indicator of success. Currently, the database hosts more than 5,000 technologies from more than 50 research organizations worldwide.

Source: Journalism.co.uk

SignHear’s dynamic signature verification by Alaris is a biometric technology that verifies identity by analyzing the sound patterns created by an individual’s written signature.  These sounds are captured and analyzed by a patented algorithm that generates an acoustic signature template unique to each user. The technology was developed by Rolls-Royce to run quality tests on jet engine blades. By firing a sound impulse into a blade and analyzing the resulting wave patterns, engineers were able to determine if any structural faults or anomalies were present.

Arizona Technology Enterprises, the IP management and tech transfer organization for Arizona State University, and the ASU Venture Catalyst provided support for the development of Alaris.

Source: Alaris

The option agreement encompasses an issued U.S. patent that covers engineered variants of protective antigen (PA) developed in the laboratory of Harvard professor John Collier. PA is the principal determinant of protective immunity to anthrax. Soligenix hopes to develop the Collier anthrax vaccine with an efficacy profile superior to other anthrax vaccines.

Source:  Yahoo Finance

The device prepares the blood sample, separating red blood cells and guiding the remaining plasma onto the biochip. When patients suffer from sepsis, their immune system reacts by producing certain proteins. The biochip uses these in its diagnosis; antibodies positioned on the chip fit these proteins like a key fits a lock. If the proteins are present in the blood, the antibodies fish them out of the fluid and bind them to the chip.

The apparatus determines whether proteins have been caught when the chip is rinsed with a solution containing the appropriate antibodies, which have in turn been marked with a fluorescent dye, explains IPM scientist Manuel Kemmler. “These bind to the proteins. When the chip is illuminated, the dye lights up.” The researchers can even test for different proteins at the same time in one cycle by placing different catcher molecules on the chip to which specific molecules in the blood attach themselves. With colleagues from a university hospital, the researchers have already successfully tested prototypes of the device and biochip.

Source:  EurekAlert

Launched this semester by UT engineering professor Bob Metcalfe, a legendary inventor and tech entrepreneur, 1 Semester Startup gives undergraduates the chance to learn from some of Austin’s most successful company founders. (See related eNews item here.) “The big surprise was that there are so many people out there who want you to succeed,” Harrison says. “They’ve told us to get ahold of them after this class, whenever we need help.”

Metcalfe, who joined UT as professor of innovation at the Cockrell School of Engineering this year, “did not want to add another lecture course on start-up theory and/or skills, nor have students do class project startups,” he explains. “We aimed this one at undergrads starting companies in the tradition of (Dell Inc. founder) Michael Dell and (Whole Foods founder) John Mackey.”

Seventy-five students — half from computer science and the rest a mix of engineering, business, and other majors — took part. Some, like Harrison and Smurdon, arrived with products already under way. During class, students broke into teams, forming 20 start-ups. Metcalfe, Baer and Butler enlisted 28 mentors from the Austin business community to work with students as they tackled development, market research, product testing, and sales and marketing. Some classes featured guest speakers. Others talked about protecting IP, developing business ethics, and building a lean start-up.

A running theme was the importance of building a personal network. “Start-ups have to network to recruit people, raise money, lead, plan, execute, market, and sell products,” says Metcalfe, who will teach the course with Baer and Butler again in the spring.

Source:  The Statesman

The women started the project last spring in a class called “Invent.” Their assignment was to develop a concept for a product, then spend the semester researching and developing their idea. “After talking to local surgeons about the effectiveness of current lighting in an operating room, we discovered there was room for improvement,” Carter says. “Although the light intensity in the operating room is great, shadows occupy the actual surgical cavity, making it more difficult than expected for surgeons to see what they are doing. We decided to design a tool that would get the light as close to the surgical cavity as possible.”

Today, the device exists only as a basic prototype, but they have filed a provisional patent application with help from the U’s Technology Commercialization Office. “Next we are going to research what the market wants and build an even better prototype so we can apply for a full patent next May,” Ashmead says.

Source: Newswise

The process has industrial importance since it leads to a significant increase in solubility and dissolution properties of almost any active ingredient without a high energy investment. Enhancing such solubility is especially important in pharmaceuticals, where nearly 50% of newly discovered drugs cannot be administered or are poorly absorbed due to low solubility. Increasing solubility is also important in the field of agriculture, since the majority of insecticides are highly hydrophobic, so regular application requires the use of organic solvents, which are harmful to the farmer and the environment.

In cosmetics, many active ingredients for dermal delivery also are water-resistant, so incorporating them into non-greasy, water-based formulations is important. The process invented by Margulis-Goshen can be applied in many other fields, including nutrition and the manufacture of printing ink and paint. The invention was patented by Yissum, the tech transfer company of the Hebrew University, which is seeking commercial partners for further R&D.

Source:  EurekAlert

Kevin Byrne, vice president and chief operating officer of The University Financing Foundation, has been elected 2012 president of the Association of University Research Parks (AURP).

Sources: OCAST and The Sacramento Bee

To contact us about placing a position on our online job listing site, contact Sara Henderson Norris at advertise@technologytransfertactics.com, or call her at 877-729-0959, ext. 5.

Technology Transfer Tactics,
Vol. 5, No. 12, December 2011

• Fixed fee deals with U.S. law firms, foreign affiliates bring huge savings for BYU. An imaginative program to control patent prosecution costs by going to fixed fee arrangements with all of its U.S. law firms has enabled the BYU Technology Transfer Office to increase its number of patent applications by several hundred percent while holding the line on total yearly patent prosecution expenses.
• New pact brings “express” concept to sponsored research agreements. With so much interest and attention focused on express licensing vehicles, it was perhaps just a matter of time before the approach was applied to IP arising from sponsored research agreements.
• Purdue’s OTC creates new service to help app developers get to market. Following the first disclosure of a mobile app by a faculty member, the Purdue Research Foundation’s Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) recognized an untapped opportunity to both create a new revenue stream and better serve its researchers.
• Legal Opinion: The not-so-obvious and potentially hazardous consequences of the Stanford v. Roche ruling.
• Commercialization Clinic aims to show grad students path to market. Graduate students can be a prime source of innovative technology at a university, but getting their projects into the commercialization pipeline can be daunting given that most students know little or nothing about the process.
• Rapid Start-Up School seeks to foster entrepreneurial postdocs and grad students. A new program at Arizona State University aims to harness the creativity of the school’s postdoc and grad student communities and channel it into new companies to pump up the state’s economy.
• What TTOs need to know about freedom-to-operate analyses. Full-scale freedom-to-operate investigations are complex and expensive, typically handled by outside law firms, but it’s still important for TTO managers to know what they are.

*To be considered for this position you must apply online at: www.inl.gov/careers

Responsibilities 

The role of this position is to assist the Sr. Commercialization Manager in establishing strategic, long-term relationships with external customers and with INL management and technical teams in order to promote access to INL facilities, capabilities and intellectual property in a manner that benefits the American economy and competitiveness.

Under the strategic supervision of a Senior Commercialization Manager, manage assigned portfolio of deployable technology and intellectual property (IP) to advance INL’s nuclear energy mission objectives, which includes:  

• Building a strategic portfolio of deployable technologies that  support lab-wide and nuclear, energy and environment or national homeland security mission strategies;
• Securing and building strategic intellectual property (IP) assets;
• Identifying the best use of IP and deployable technologies ;
• Providing opinions and valuations on potential IP;
• Developing and carrying out deployment strategies that support lab- wide and nuclear mission strategies;
• Defining and executing marketing strategies for the strategic  portfolio of technologies and IP;
• Preparing for, carrying out and representing the company in  negotiations in a manner consistent with INL’s mission objectives  and Technology Transfer policies;
• Reducing negotiations to professionally written, mutually beneficial  agreements;
• Identifying and communicating risks of technology transfer decisions  to stakeholders/decision makers within the company;
• Mitigating risks of technology transfer decisions to the extent  practical;
• Recommending final agreements for approval and execution;
• Managing the agreement life cycle, e.g., modifications, compliance,  performance, termination, etc.;
• Understanding and ensuring compliance with policies, procedures, and  regulations associated with IP and licenses and related contracts  (including conflict of interest and fairness of opportunity); and
• Training INL professionals involved in nuclear mission  accomplishment in technology management and intellectual property  aspects;

Under the strategic direction of a Senior Commercialization Manager, identify nonfederal technology transfer opportunities and translate such opportunities to working relationships that promote the advancement of INL’s mission, which includes:

• Developing and carrying out nonfederal technology transfer  strategies that support energy and environment mission strategies;
• Developing effective working relationships with external customers  (including other DOE laboratories, other Battelle organizations, and  industry) and with management and technical teams across the INL to enable access to INL facilities and capabilities;
• Preparing for and representing the INL in negotiations in a manner  consistent with INL’s mission objectives and policies;
• Reducing negotiations to professionally written, mutually beneficial  agreements;
• Recommending final agreements for approval and execution;
• Managing the agreement life cycle, e.g., modifications, termination, close-out, etc.;
• Identifying and communicating risks of nonfederal technology  transfer decisions to stakeholders/decision makers within the  company; and
• Understanding and complying with policies, procedures, and regulations related to Cooperative Research and Development  Agreements (CRADA), Work for Others (WFO) and other technology  transfer contractual mechanisms used at the INL.

Personally own and actively engage INL’s technology deployment mission.  Brand Technology Deployment as a responsive, professional, high quality and fully integrated organization

Minimum Qualifications :

SP0100:  Bachelor’s Degree in relevant technical, legal and/or business field.

SP0200:  Bachelor’s Degree and 4 years experience or advanced degree and 2 years relevant experience in relevant technical, legal and/or business field.

Preferred Qualifications:  Strong preference towards advanced degrees in technical/science/engineering, business, or law.  Experience in commercialization of technology, including experience in contracting, technology transfer and/or intellectual property management highly desired.

Skills/Abilities: The Commercialization Manager must possess the ability to understand and appreciate complex legal issues, understand technical issues, manage multiple tasks and projects under time constraints, and communicate and interface and interact effectively with relevant Laboratory personnel (technical and managerial) and multiple external customers. The Commercialization Manager must be capable of representing the INL professionally during external negotiations.  The Commercialization Manager must possess a knowledge and ability to understand financial information and intellectual property valuation techniques, and be willing to assume responsibility for activities of considerable fiscal significance.  The Commercialization Manager must be able to initiate tactical actions to accomplish strategic goals, work independently with limited oversight from the Senior Commercialization Manager, and have the ability to engage cross-organizational and cross-disciplinary teams to accomplish technology deployment project goals.

Special Requirements and/or Training:

Certified Licensing Professional status or willingness/ability to obtain certification preferred or equivalent training.

Essential Functions 

An Essential Function is a core duty required for the job position which the employee must be able to fulfill, with or without accommodation. Information provided below will be used during the interview to help describe the job so the applicant has a reasonable understanding of the job duties/expectations.

Essential functions include:

• Near Vision
• Typing/keyboard

Environmental, Safety & Health 

 Must be familiar with, and comply with all relevant health and safety requirements.  Must be knowledgeable of emergency action policies and procedures, methods for reporting/resolving work practices or conditions to available cognizant professionals. 

Please Apply Before: 

January 15, 2012 (Midnight) 

Equal Employment Opportunity 

INL is an Equal Opportunity Employer M/F/D/V

The Idaho National Laboratory www.inl.gov is involved with a major growth phase and we are currently looking for highly skilled motivated individuals who can contribute and lead in the advancement of our mission in nuclear energy research, science and national defense.  With 4,400 scientist, researchers and support staff, the laboratory works with national and international governments, universities and industry partners to discover new science and develop technologies that underpin the nation’s nuclear and renewable energy, national security and environmental missions. 

The INL is located in Idaho Falls, ID www.visitidahofalls.com www.visitidaho.org The area is in the heart of some of the best outdoor recreation areas in the world.  Access to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, Craters of the Moon National Monument, Sun Valley Idaho, scenic Shoshone Falls, Jackson Hole Wyoming, Salt Lake City Utah and areas of Nevada

*******Just a few of the benefits The Idaho National Laboratory can offer*******

Cutting Edge Projects
3.5 Weeks of Vacation (Accrual first year)
Every other Friday OFF! = 9/80 work schedules
Full Medical, Dental, Vision, Life, 401K
90-Hours of Federal Holiday Pay includes 2- Extra Floater Days
Educational Reimbursement Programs
Low cost of living

Reporting to the Executive Director, the Intellectual Property/Patent Manager manages the protection operations of Rensselaer’s intellectual property and is responsible for receiving, processing and managing new invention disclosures; determining patentability of inventions; preparing, filing and monitoring appropriate patent applications in coordination with outside patent counsel; and supporting the licensing efforts within the Office of Technology Commercialization.

Minimum qualifications include a Bachelor’s degree in a field of engineering or physical science, and registration as Patent Agent/attorney with a minimum of five years’ experience in the transactional and patent opinion/analysis, patent preparation and prosecution experience, and interaction with external counsel.

Preferred qualifications are Master’s degree in a field of engineering or physical science, and experience in the licensing of technology.

In order to comply with applicable export control laws and regulations, only candidates who are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents of the U.S. will be considered.

Qualified candidates are invited to apply online at https://rpijobs.rpi.edu and reference job #20110248.

We welcome candidates who will bring diverse intellectual, geographical, gender and ethnic perspectives to Rensselaer’s work and campus communities.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer

Kurman created four bubble charts to map these measures, using publication data from the ISI Web of Science database and data on disclosures and industry funding from AUTM’s 2010 licensing surveys. In comparing the top 22 research universities in terms of total research funding, the vertical axis represents the number of publications in 2010 and the horizontal axis represents invention disclosures in the same year. The size of the bubble represents the amount of industry funding for that year.

“So, if a university bubble is high up on the chart, that university produces a lot of papers. If a university sits out to the far right, it creates a lot of new inventions. The bigger the bubble representing a particular university, the more industry funding that university received in 2010,” Kurman explains.

Not surprisingly, Harvard researchers publish a significantly larger total number of papers than those at other universities. Duke, University of Colorado, and Washington University of St. Louis have high levels of research funding from industry sources. CalTech researchers are strong in both paper publishing and creating inventions: on average, for each invention reported by a CalTech researcher, six scholarly papers were published.

When the universities are re-sorted according to those that publish the most scholarly papers per federal research dollar, a new group of universities emerges as top performers.

Harvard shrinks in comparison to the Universities of Arkansas and Alabama. The University of Akron also ranks in the top 20 according to publishing per federal dollar and dominates its peers according to new inventions and industry funding.

Kurman also maps 20 universities that attract the most industry funding per million dollars of federal funding, then charts these by publications (vertical axis) and invention disclosures (horizontal axis), adjusting the bubble size to the amount of industry funding in proportion to federal dollars.

Duke receives the most industry research funding per million federal dollars, followed by University of West Florida and then West Virginia University. The University of Maryland dominates according to both number of new inventions and publications.

Finally, Kurman charts university inventions, choosing 20 universities by dividing their total number of formally disclosed new inventions by the amount of federal funding they received.

Overall, Brigham Young University turns its federal funding into the largest number of new inventions, disclosing on average five inventions per million dollars. Louisiana Tech, Auburn and the New Jersey Institute of Technology also perform well, although the relatively small size of their bubbles indicates that they earn somewhat less in industry funding.

Source:  Triple Helix Innovation

The three patents related to the case involve the use of the isotope deuterium to improve the lifetime of computer chips. In the complaint, UI said the technology was developed by Joseph Lyding, PhD, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Karl Hess, PhD, professor emeritus of engineering. The deuterium passivation process is one of the top royalty-generating technologies for the Urbana campus. Used in semiconductor devices, the technology is said to provide a solution to hot carrier effects, which can cause problems with device reliability, according to UI’s Office of Technology Management.

Last year, the university reported that Samsung had signed a license agreement with the UI to use the deuterium technology. At the time of the announcement, Lesley Millar, director of UI’s Office of Technology Management, said the revenue potential from licensing that technology was in the millions.

Source: The News Gazette

The U hopes to make industry-sponsored funding a bigger piece of its research pie, in part because federal funding for research has leveled off and could be cut. Meanwhile, research and development funded by industry is growing, but not at the U. Although the university’s total research take has risen in recent years, the amount from business and industry has stalled at just 4% of the U’s total.

“No matter how you look at this, Minnesota is really sort of lagging,” says Tim Mulcahy, the university’s vice president for research. “That lagging performance is even more profound given the environment we find ourselves in. We are in the midst of some of the largest Fortune 500 companies that sponsor research. We should be doing better.”

The new model allows a for-profit entity to prepay 10% of the sponsored research agreement — or $15,000, whichever is greater — for exclusive rights to the resulting inventions. The company handles all patenting costs, including attorneys’ fees. In exchange, the university nabs 1% in royalties when net sales exceed $20 million a year.

Source:  Grand Forks Herald

Two universities that stand out as proactive examples of how to meet the economic development challenge. Rutgers University and the University of Maryland have each created a dedicated economic development office, and are actively employing creative strategies to stimulate economic impact and measure their results. Rutgers’ Dr. Michael J. Pazzani and UMD’s Brian Darmody will share their methods, challenges, successes, and measurement strategies in a webinar scheduled for January 18th: Transform Your TTO Into an Economic Development Engine. For complete program details and to register, CLICK HERE.

ALSO, COMING THIS FRIDAY:

• THIS FRIDAY: How Your University’s Innovations Can Become a Fixture in Big Pharma’s Pipeline
• Thursday, January 26, 2012: Life Under AIA: Anticipating and Surviving Post Grant Challenges

In January, the DOE will reveal which laboratories will participate in the pilot, which is being conducted in conjunction with the federal memorandum issued in October directing agencies with federal labs to accelerate tech transfer and research commercialization. (Read the previous eNews item here.) ACT also complements the goals of the Administration’s “Startup America” initiative by supporting high-growth entrepreneurship and start-up companies. (Read the previous eNews item here.)  

Using input from industries based on their experience working with the DOE laboratories, ACT authorizes:

• A more flexible framework for negotiating IP rights to facilitate tech transfer from lab to marketplace.
• Contractors operating national laboratories to partner with businesses using terms that are better aligned with industry practice in an effort to attract more private investment.
• National labs to participate in groups formed to address complex technological challenges of mutual interest.

To view the FAQs about ACT, visit the U.S. Department of Energy.

Source: Environmental-Expert.com

Justice, a bear of a man at 6 feet 7 who was once named West Virginian of the Year for his benevolence, gives a simple explanation for the contribution: “They’re going to do things to change the world, and I’d like to be a part of it.” Thomas Graham, a world-renowned hand surgeon and chair of Cleveland Clinic Innovations who is a close friend of Justice’s, is adding $1 million to fund patent applications. Graham will serve as the inaugural endowed innovation chair, though he won’t receive any compensation from the Justice donation.

The story of how the combined $11 million gift came to be begins with the hand doctor and the billionaire businessman, who both love the Greenbrier — the famed resort where presidents have vacationed and Congress built a Cold War fallout shelter. Graham, whose family has belonged to the Greenbrier for a generation, says Justice brought the resort back from the brink of bankruptcy when he bought it for $20.1 million in 2009. Graham was eating at a Greenbrier restaurant when he spotted Justice walking across the room and initiated a handshake. “I had heard of Jim because he lives very close to the resort,” Graham says. “I wanted to thank him personally.”

The more the two talked, the more they found in common. They both golfed. They shared a keen interest in sports. Graham, who is well-known among professional athletes for his skill as a hand surgeon, helped bring sports celebrities like Shaquille O’Neal and Tim Tebow to meet the high schoolers that Justice coached. Justice invited Graham’s family for Thanksgiving. Graham also advised Justice on a new medical institute that is being built at the Greenbrier. Eventually, Justice began asking about the Cleveland Clinic and its entrepreneurship work.

Graham says that Justice’s gift — the largest donation in the history of Cleveland Clinic Innovations — is uncommon because it allows the Clinic freedom in the way it is spent within the program. “I don’t need my name on a building,” says Justice, whose daughter is in medical school. “I just want to pass on some goodness.”

Source: cleveland.com

University inventors, like other product creators, are unlikely to achieve product-market fit in a vacuum, he points out, because that requires customer interaction. The current university reward system is designed to keep researchers on campus — far away from the human beings whose lives they are supposed to improve. Universities also suffer from skill homogeneity in a world where diversity is king. There are plenty of world-class technologists, but finding business and operational skill sets is very hard. Consequently, the tech transfer world is dominated by a tiny number of professors at each university who happen to have business and/or operational skills — essentially by accident, he argues.

Finally, universities with billion-dollar budgets allocate only a handful of millions to their TTOs. In alignment with the incentive model of the university, the vast majority of that money then is allocated to the administration and identification of even more research funding. Only a tiny trickle goes towards the actual commercialization of the research output, Seetzen points out.
Typically, none of the money goes into actual projects, leaving TTOs “irrelevant as resource-providers,” he maintains.

Source: Business Insider

The company’s Tech Transfer University subscription program allows you to customize your training to match your organization’s specific needs while saving significantly on the cost of each program. You choose the number of programs and the specific sessions you wish to access, and the more you choose, the more you save! Also available is an annual Total Access Pass providing access to any or all of 100+ live and recorded programs. It’s a great way to stretch your professional development budget, eliminate travel costs while enhancing staff expertise, and conveniently get critical guidance on the key issues you must address to boost your performance. For complete details and to view the 2012 schedule of events, CLICK HERE.

1. Answer the most important question: Is your company’s technology novel? You’d better hope so because it will greatly enhance your chances of obtaining funding.

2. Join the Army. Of the service branches under the DoD, the Army has the most money and takes the lead in medical research, Powell says. The Army has 16 labs across the nation, with six that perform medical research. The Navy has 17 labs, but just one does medical research.

3. Don’t limit yourself to the DoD. For example, last year’s health reform law created a $10 billion Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which is doling out grants to projects that show promise in reducing health costs and improving quality.

4. Relationships are key. The public sector is no different than the private. Cultivate relationships with key department leaders at government research centers. Invite public officials and elected leaders to tour your facility so you can demonstrate your technology to them.

5. Show job creation and economic growth. Admittedly, government researchers who control purse strings are generally less interested in creating jobs than they are in advancing technology. But in a bleak economy, they may be the only ones.

Source:  MED City News

The moderate increase in salaries is seen across many disciplines in this year’s data, with the highest salaries found in areas under the most pressure to improve the public’s safety and standard of living. This translates to a focus on specialties such as virology and immunology (infectious disease and autoimmune disorders), genomics (personalized medicine), developmental biology (stem cell research for regenerating damaged organs and tissues), and cancer research. As the funding landscape continues to change, with higher salaries and more job offers coming from industry than ever before, researchers looking to earn more will have to think hard about how their skills fit with the demands of the times, according to The Scientist. Many more scientists may find themselves considering a shift to industry and government positions, which offer higher pay.

In academics, salaries in the life sciences vary widely across disciplines and generally reflect the level of interest and investment in a particular field. This year’s big winners include biophysics, virology, cancer/oncology, genomics, neuroscience, developmental biology, and immunology — fields that largely encompass research areas valued by the aging baby boom population, says Alan Edwards, a product leader for Kelly Scientific Resources. “Neuroscience translates to [the idea that] we are looking for clarity of mind,” he explains. Cancer/oncology, genomics, and immunology also hit on ailments that affect aging populations. In biophysics, researchers are looking for ways to help the elderly maintain mobility and independence. “The three things that everybody’s looking for as they age are their health and well-being, mobility, and clarity of mind,” Edwards says. “That fits with where the research dollars are going and where there’s the highest earning potential.”

Source: The Scientist

Importantly, the new program does not compete with the UC’s ongoing tech transfer operations, notes Douglas Crawford, PhD, associate director at QB3, the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, which launched the new program. Rather, he explains, the Startup in a Box program complements the campuses’ TTOs and offers inventors a parallel, not alternative, avenue for start-up expertise and assets. The Box program and the UC system’s commercialization operations represent “a Venn diagram of service offerings. The two circles overlap, but are not superimposable. Every entrepreneur should take advantage of both,” Crawford says.

A key difference for the start-up program, he adds, is that “we can get engaged in things that the TTOs don’t have bandwidth for or are conflicted out of doing,” he says. Often, TTOs have to focus their efforts on the “zero-to-start stage,” he explains, while the Box program can stay engaged with company formation and beyond. “We begin with incorporation and end with entry into an incubator,” he adds. “We do not abandon them, we just move them into a different suite of services.”

Also, he notes, most campus TTOs don’t get into the nitty-gritty details of, say, opening commercial bank accounts and registering with grants.gov. “There’s a need for agencies with a broader mandate than TTOs usually have,” Crawford emphasizes. “We have support from the state, from donors and from industry partners, all of which allows us to provide more services. TTOs are often chronically under-resourced, so one big advantage is we can bring to bear resources they might not have.”

He stresses that the Box program “begins with a different frame of reference. One of the things that distinguishes our activity is it’s motivated by economic growth and not by licensing technologies per se.” A detailed article on the Start-Up in a Box program appears in the November issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the full article, along with more than four years of archived best practices and success strategies, CLICK HERE.

“If you had unlimited funds, burn rate would be an irrelevant number,” Wilson points out. “But I’ve never seen a company with unlimited cash.” Entrepreneurs, CEOs, and certainly CFOs should always know how much cash they have. If they are burning cash, they should know the rate at which their cash balance is being depleted. And of course, they should know the date on which they will have no cash left.

In addition to the “back-of-the-envelope” calculation above, here’s a more sophisticated way to calculate burn rate. Summarize your monthly expenses on your income statement, then then look at any outlays of cash for capital expenditures or other regular uses of cash on the balance sheet and cash flow statement. Add these monthly cash outlays together for your “gross burn rate.” Next, look at revenues or, even better, cash receipts from revenues. Include all incoming cash you are certain that you can count on every month. Subtract this from your gross burn and you’ll have a “net burn rate.” This should be the amount of cash that your business burns in any given month. Do a “sanity check” by comparing these results to the back-of-the-envelope method to be sure they fall in the same ballpark.

Burn rates can change pretty quickly, Wilson points out, so assuming a constant burn rate can be very dangerous. Always know if your burn rate is going up or down and include that fact in your analysis. Most start-ups burn money for a time, and during that period of cash consumption, keep a close eye on cash balance, burn rate, and cash out date. You’ll know when you need to raise money again, and you’ll know how much you are investing in your company on a monthly basis.

Source: MBA Mondays

TCARE (Tailored Caregiver Assessment and Referral) was created by Rhonda Montgomery, PhD, Helen Bader Endowed Chair in Applied Gerontology in UWM’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare. The process is designed to guide care managers in assessing the needs and strengths of family members who serve as caregivers and to link them with the most effective resources.

The mission of CareConscious is continually advance positive caregiving outcomes through technological innovation, unique content delivery, and precisely customized programs that make the lives of family caregivers easier, healthier, and more manageable. “The CareConscious model, which offers direct support to family caregivers via the Internet, will allow TCARE to reach an even broader audience,” Montgomery says.

Source: WisBusiness.com

Several years ago, Bergen-based researchers Helga B. Salvesen and Lars A. Akslen discovered that the tumors of women with aggressive forms of endometrial cancer had elevated levels of a certain group of genetic mutations. Their research was a collaborative effort with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. BTO helped the researchers to establish a cooperative agreement with the U.S. biotechnology firm OvaGene Oncology, which has commercialized the research results in the form of a test. (Read the previous eNews item here.)

Licensing as a means to commercialization is a relatively new challenge for Norway’s publicly funded research institutions, but BTO negotiated a profitable licensing agreement with the U.S. institutions that provided the University of Bergen and Haukeland University Hospital with 50% of the IP rights. In the agreement, MIT and Harvard gave BTO exclusive rights to commercialize the application on its own behalf.

“It’s very rare for elite international universities to give others such rights. We at BTO see it as recognition of our work and the expertise we have built up over time,” Bjørnhaug says.

Source: Health Canal