In the same way that funding for early-stage innovations is changing, so is how those innovations are translated from the bench to the bedside.
“Our office, which was formerly a traditional tech transfer office, has very much become a business office,” said Gary Sclar from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Office of Research and Technology Ventures. Sclar joined two other tech transfer experts in a discussion of commercialization trends and issues at the Redefining Early Stage Innovations conference last week.
Less federal research money and fewer investor dollars are going into early-stage research. So the relationship between institutions and industry no longer focuses so predominantly on straight-up out-licensing deals, instead encompassing collaborations throughout various stages of research and development, the panelists said.
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“It’s less of a traditional tech transfer approach, where you start with intellectual property that’s developed and you hopefully wait for someone to open the door and say that they want to license it,” said Nandan Padukone, vice president of the Joslin Diabetes Center Office of Commercialization & Ventures. “It’s less about the specific patents that are filed but more about the research program around it and figuring out what the problem really is.”
That’s led to more co-development deals, like the project Joslin researchers are working on with Ember Therapeutics to explore the role of brown fat in managing obesity and diabetes.
Likewise, Children’s Hospital Boston has a similar research development deal with Shire focused on developing new treatments for rare pediatric diseases. The hospital launched a technology development fund in 2009 that Monique Yoakim-Turk, assistant director of the technology and innovation development office, said has in turn helped draw industry interest to earlier stage research projects.
Sclar of Dana-Farber said the research and technology ventures office has over time had to adapt. “There’s no one in our office who exclusively does business development, but there’s a handful of us that are proactively engaged in (going to events), being out there and looking for alliances and strategic partnerships,” he said.
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The office is also exploring the potential of employing an entrepreneur-in-residence and create space for incubating startups, he added.
It’s a good thing these offices are adapting, as they play an important role in the medical innovation ecosystem. Universities and research institutions in the U.S. spin out more than 700 startups and execute more than 5,000 licenses a year, according to the Association of Technology Managers’ most recent survey.
