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Photo by Reed Hutchinson UCLA
Photographic Services
Associate Professor Farhad Parhami of the Department of
Medicine’s cardiology division examines X-ray film with
Rebecca Goodman of the Office of Intellectual Property Administration.
Parhami and his team of researchers are working on a treatment
for osteoporosis. Goodman is helping Parhami get his research
into the marketplace.
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revamped team working more closely with researchers
OIPA helps bring next big thing to market
BY JUDY LIN-EFTEKHAR
UCLA Today
For a decade, Farhad Parhami, an associate professor in the Department
of Medicine’s cardiology division, has studied the science
of lipid biology. Working in his laboratory in the Center for the
Health Sciences, Parhami and his team of researchers have made advances
that hold startling possibilities for a cure or prevention for osteoporosis.
The team found that specific oxysterols, which are byproducts
of cholesterol oxidation, can stimulate the formation and activity
of bone-forming cells called osteoblasts. With no similar therapeutic
treatment currently available for this debilitating bone disease,
Parhami believes that the market for his discovery is potentially
huge. “It’s very exciting,” he said.
Now Parhami is working with UCLA’s newly revamped Office
of Intellectual Property Administration (OIPA) in the hopes that
one day the fruits of his research will reach the marketplace.
Parhami is one of nearly 2,400 faculty researchers at UCLA committed
to finding solutions to some of life’s most perplexing problems.
Supported by grants totaling $786 million in 2002-03, they have
earned UCLA a well-deserved spot among the world’s premier
research universities.
Much of their pioneering work has already reached the global marketplace.
Patented technology from UCLA has been licensed by hundreds of companies
such as Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Novartis and Boston Scientific.
UCLA research has also provided the basis for start-up companies
that create jobs and fuel the economy. The biopharmaceutical company
Agensys, Inc., founded in 1997 (as UroGenesys) by UCLA oncologists
and cancer researchers Arie Belldegrun, Owen Witte, Robert Figlin
and Jean deKernion, develops novel diagnostic and therapeutic products
for prostate cancer.
Pro-Duct Health was founded by UCLA surgeon Susan Love, based
on the ductal lavage catheter she developed for early detection
of breast cancer; Pro-Duct was recently purchased by Cytyc Corp.
for $167 million.
While technology transfer between academia and business has a
long history at the University of California, UCLA in 1990 became
the first campus in the UC system to establish its own technology-transfer
program. However, enthusiasm quickly outstripped staffing and other
resources, and UCLA found itself lagging behind other top universities
in moving creative ideas from the lab to the marketplace.
“We lost opportunities to leverage many of the exciting
ideas coming from our campus,” said Chancellor Albert Carnesale.
“This reinforced a culture that did not encourage our faculty
to be entrepreneurs.”
Determined to rectify this, Carnesale directed a major reorganization
of OIPA under the leadership of Executive Director Andrew Neighbour.
“The assets and opportunities are here,” Neighbour
said, “and particularly the need to serve our faculty is here.
Those who wish to commercialize technology deserve to get value-added
assistance from the technology-transfer program.”
While tech transfer serves the university, business and society,
ultimately it serves the faculty — researchers who stand to
benefit professionally and financially from the commercialization
of inventions that are, by law, owned by UC as a state-supported
university. This arrangement between the university and its faculty
is also mandated by the federal Bayh-Dole Act, which requires that
inventions developed with taxpayers’ money be diligently managed
by the university where the research was done.
The challenge of managing faculty-developed intellectual property
is well understood by Neighbour, who earlier in his career was a
researcher in virology and embryology at Albert Einstein College
of Medicine in New York. He later worked in private industry and
for four years directed the Center of Technology Management at Washington
University in St. Louis, Mo.
Under his leadership, OIPA has grown from five to 17 staff members
with expertise in business development as well as intellectual property
in engineering, physical science and biomedicine. Bright and eager,
these new hires fan out across campus seeking professors working
on the next big thing.
Parhami, for one, is committed to remaining at UCLA as he accelerates
his research, even though it means he won’t have access to
the same level of funding and resources available at a big pharmaceutical
or biotech company. To overcome these obstacles, the associate professor
hopes to start his own company, Osteoscience. But Parhami is a scientist
and not a businessman. So the how-to of getting an entrepreneurial
venture off the ground was something of a mystery to him.
Fortunately, he had access to world-class pros. At the Anderson
School of Management, Parhami sought help writing a business plan
from Adjunct Associate Professor Robert Foster and a talented M.B.A.
student named Matt Abbott. The scientist turned to OIPA for further
help clarifying his ideas and fleshing out his business plan. Among
those who came to his aid were George Abe, an OIPA business-development
manager who has a background in venture-capital and high-tech firms,
and Rebecca Goodman, an OIPA technology-transfer officer who has
a degree in biology and a law degree with specialization in intellectual-property
law.
Parhami’s long discussions with these business-savvy advisers
prepared him as he made a pitch to potential investors from the
Tech Coast Angels (TCA), a group of some 220 businesspeople in Los
Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties. Through OIPA, TCA holds
bimonthly investor forums on campus and invites faculty researchers
like Parhami to make presentations. If the Angels like what they
hear, they could potentially invest $250,000 to $2 million in seed
and early-stage projects.
Another resource available to UCLA researchers is a new, pre-seed
investment fund, the UCLA Lab2Market Investment Fund, spearheaded
by Neighbour and David Lundberg, director of strategic alliances
for OIPA and UCLA’s Department of Development. The fund, in
which California venture-capital firms invest, will provide up to
$25,000 in pre-seed money to researchers to move forward in developing
prototypes or hiring a graduate student to conduct additional research.
These funds are primarily intended for researchers whose federal
funding prohibits them from pursuing commercial aspects of their
work with those same monies. The first Lab2Market Investment Fund
grant went to Parhami to enable him to test his therapeutic approach
on animals. OIPA is also exploring potential synergies between the
fund and the Academic Senate’s Council on Research Faculty
Grants Program. In the meantime, Parhami has had OIPA’s assistance
and support in obtaining two U.S. patents for his discovery.
OIPA makes decisions to pursue a patent — which can take
more than five years and cost more than $40,000 for U.S. rights
alone — on a case-by-case basis, since not all inventions
are patentable or commercially viable, Goodman explained.
Once a patent application is completed and successfully added
to UCLA’s portfolio, OIPA pursues licensing more inventively
and aggressively than ever before. A detailed database helps sort
out potential customers, who are contacted individually. A Web site
newsletter, “What’s BRUIN in the Labs?,” describes
UCLA inventions and inventors to an online audience ranging from
business-development officers at Fortune 500 companies to venture
capitalists and investment bankers.
Through a program called HiddenGems, OIPA staff members maintain
relationships with hundreds of companies and contacts in business
and industry. This past summer, OIPA introduced members of the investment
community attending UCLA’s First Annual Review of Research
to researchers in fields ranging from nanotechnology to molecular
genetics.
In spite of all these efforts, “chances are that nobody
will notice some of these early inventions for awhile,” Neighbour
said. This is simply the nature of university research, he explained,
which tends to explore new ideas in their earliest stages of gestation.
“It’s going to be several years before anybody wants
to take that technology and do something with it.”
Parhami could face an especially long uphill climb because this
delay is particularly true in medical therapeutics, where millions
of dollars can be spent on research.
Nevertheless, there are signs that OIPA’s efforts are paying
off: From an average of 130 inventions per year for the five years
preceding OIPA’s reorganization, new-invention disclosures
rose to 170 last year and are expected to continue increasing.
Also last year, 57 new U.S. patents were filed and 68 new U.S.
and foreign patents were issued. The number of new licenses executed,
25, was double that of the previous year. In one recent agreement,
a new UCLA start-up, ORFID, Inc., licensed two technologies developed
by Professor Yang Yang’s lab in the Department of Materials
Science and Engineering.
Currently, OIPA is managing 790 active cases in its intellectual-property
portfolio, with 388 active, issued U.S. patents. UCLA’s licensing
activity returns $10 million a year in royalty and fee income, which
is shared with inventors, their labs and research programs at UCLA.
Although optimistic about OIPA’s growth, Neighbour said,
“It will be many years before we see a commensurate increase
in revenues, because you only really see big money when you have
a product selling in the marketplace and you’re collecting
annual royalties. The lead time from license to the market can be
anywhere from two to 15 years.”
Yet, he added, “At the end of the day, tech transfer is
not about the money. Tech transfer is about creating an environment
where our researchers will flourish. It’s a business-development
process.”
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