M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Date: February 2008
Duration: 0 / 27:09
Well, hi, all, thank you. I'm Jim Coleman. As, as we mentioned I'm the
Vice Provost for Research at Rice University. And what I'm gonna try to
do in this first, sort of, 20 minutes is just give you some reasons
why, you know, especially for those of you who that haven't been
engaged with us before, why you as a scientists might really want to
engage in innovation, creativity, and ultimately commercializing that
innovation and creativity. And to get started I'll give you a little
bit about me. Which given when you learn about this you might ask
yourself, you'll be a little surprised that I care. Sort of joke that a
subtitle of this slide could be, you know, Jim, you know, what do you
know about Tech Transfer? And I'd say, well I slept in a Holiday Inn
last night. But so to give you a sense of my background a little bit,
and I'll get to my, my job, but I was, I grew up in Pittsburgh and have
a, you know, exact opposite of entrepreneurship training. I grew up
with an urban civil rights leader and a special education teacher,
healthcare social worker, mother. So I did the obvious thing with
anybody who grew up with that kind of an urban family is I became a
plant physiological ecologist, and went out into the desserts and the
mountains to sort of understand how plants respond to various kinds of
stresses, which did lead me into some molecular biology work in plant
heat shock proteins. When I was a professor at Syracuse University, and
I had been very successful; received the NSF Young Investigator Award,
and several other major research grants. I had an opportunity to go run
a program at the National Science Foundation. And when I went to, when
I went to run the program and they interviewed me they asked me, are
you doing this because you think you want to become an academic
administrator? And I said, Oh my God, you gotta be crazy? You know,
only, only really awful people would do such a thing. But, but I did
that, and I discovered that I really, really enjoyed facilitating the
research of others, and that I was actually pretty good at it. And so,
which led me into a career of research administration. So my first role
as a research administrator was at a place called the Dessert Research
Institute of Nevada, which is a, one of the countries major
environmental science research institutions. It's part of the
University of Nevada system, but a separate campus. It's in a lot of
ways like a medical school in the sense that the faculty are, are truly
soft money, they're out being entrepreneurial all the time, out rising
research money. And as part of that I became very much engaged in the
whole State of Nevada's economic development efforts, and played a role
in setting up a tech transfer office in Nevada and articulate to the
legislatures in Nevada why it was so important, why research was so
important to the future of the state. I went off to become the Vice
Chancellor for Research at the University of Missouri Columbia where I
ran the technology transfer office there. And also University of
Missouri system made economic development its fourth mission, in
addition to research teaching and service. And I was a big role in
implementing that and explaining that. And then shepherding a lot of
success in our, in the University of Missouri's ability to
commercialize technologies, and now that led me here to Rice where,
where sort of I have that role. So unlike all of ya, I have no
credentials as an entrepreneur. But I have a lot of credentials in
helping entrepreneurs, and so I will talk to you a little bit about
that. So what I'm gonna do, you're gonna see pieces of this slide for
the next half hour. I won't go over them all. But I'm gonna try to go
over some reasons for why you might think about being innovative in the
sense of commercializing your technology, and then give you some
examples to emphasize that point. So the first one that I'm gonna talk
about, which is important to me as a research officer is being
innovative and being creative is essentially the center of the academic
universe. So that's what that slide was about. So this is a, so this is
great for me. So I came to Rice to be the research officer, and being,
you know, being the self centered egotistical maniac, I was able to put
research as the sun of the whole universe of Rice. And so, and really
in reality it is. And so when you, for those of you that don't know
much about Rice, Rice, Rice had a President, David Leebron, who just
started about 3-1/2 to 4 years ago. During his first couple of years he
put together a strategic plan for the campus. And that strategic plan,
it's a wonderfully articulated, actually strategic vision more than a
plan, and those who read it are pretty inspired. And that the number
one goal of that plan is to make Rice, to increase Rice's research
creation, innovation, and scholarship profile. And then there are nine
other items. One of the key things to me is none of those other nine
items are all driven by the energy off of the creation and innovation
of Rice's faculty. So if you want to talk about increasing our
undergraduates experiences in today's technology driven world, it's the
knowledge and innovation and creation of faculty that's gonna drive the
exceptional experiences of undergraduates. In engaging with Houston,
Houston's major concern right now is to have technology driven economic
development. That is all going to be driven by research creation and
scholarship at Rice. Rice wants to be international. That is all driven
on our research connections with scientists across the globe. And so
you can go through that whole thing, and actually it turns out that you
can make a really strong case that research and innovation is the
center of the academic universe. And I bet if you did this at M. D.
Anderson you would find out that it is the sun that's enabling you to
make cancer history. Right? And so it truly is. So that's one reason.
The second reason that I'll tell you is that it's the future of the
U.S. Economy. You all haven't been laughing at my jokes, so you'll have
to laugh at this one. This is a sign. But the way that I like to get
this one across, think about, is this, as I heard a speech when I was
in Kansas City to Kansas Cities Economic Development Group from a
senior editor of Fortune Magazine, and that's Jeff Colvin. And Jeff was
trying to get across to people the, you know the, the future for the
U.S. economy. And so he told this story. And he said, so how many of
you since you've been here, this was a lunch, this was a lunch filled
with 2,000 business leaders in Kansas City. And he said, so how many of
you have checked your cell phone or your BlackBerry since you got here?
Right? And about 80% of the people raised their hand. So he said, okay,
let's think about how the world has changed. So he said, let me read to
you something from Thomas Jefferson's memoirs. And so he stopped and he
said, okay, so this is what he read, he said, this is from Thomas
Jefferson writing, I have not heard from my ambassador to France for 2
years now. If I don't hear from him in the next year I'm gonna have to
write him a letter. And so his point to Kansas City was think about
that. Here you all business leaders in the U.S., you can't put your
BlackBerry down for 30 seconds and lest feel unconnected. And Thomas
Jefferson had an important ambassador to France that he could live
without talking to for 3 years. He said, think about what that means in
the world. In the world today someone in India can push a button and
have it affect in Houston instantaneously. The world is moving so fast.
Technology is changing so fast. And so we told these business leaders,
the only way that the U.S. is gonna be able to remain competitive in
this kind of global fast paced marketplace is we've gotta have the most
innovative and the most creative workforce in the world. Period. And
then he told all sorts of stories from our business leaders to support
that. And so I think about as an academic, I think how do you train
innovative and a creative workforce? And University of Missouri had a
great school of education, so I talked to people there. And it turns
out that they really don't know how to train creative and innovative
workforce. My experience is the best way you train a creative
innovative workforce is that you have to be innovative and creative.
And that people that are around you who will be in a creative and
innovative place will then themselves become creative and innovative.
And that's what's so important about a research University. And if we
want to change the U.S. economy, so important to what you're doing in
your labs so that the people around you will do that. So that's the
second reason. The third reason is it's your legal duty if you use
federal funds. And a lot of you might not know that. But there was an
act in 1980 called, the Baye Dole act. And for those of you who are old
enough, you might remember when actually senators could work across the
isle. Birch Baye was an old time liberal Democrat, Bob Dole was an old
time conservative Republican, they came together to change to total
face of technology in America. So prior to Baye Dole, the federal
government retained ownership to anything you invented on a federal
grant. And essentially not very much happened with it in terms of
commercialization. So Baye Dole came out and said, all right
universities, you can retain ownership of any inventions that are made
on federal grants; there are some things you have to do to do that, but
in return we expect you to file for patents, ensure commercialization,
and if you're successful, share, share the income with the inventor,
and invest that income in research and education. Bay Dole has changed
the face of the world. Some people have argued not necessarily
positively, and so, so some people have argued that Baye Dole has
inhibited innovation. And I've actually seen that in some areas of, for
example, in nanoscience where Rice has a number of technologies that
have been licensed to companies whose whole business model is to not
let anybody else get access to the technology. So for those that you
remember, when you patent something it doesn't give you a right to do
anything except keep other people from doing something. And so there
are some business models, which are, we're just gonna not let anybody
else do anything until we come up with a product. And so that's one of
the negative sides. But for the most part, a lot of great stuff has
happened. And if you go on to the, well this was, this was actually
from Colorado States website of just a number of, of medical
breakthroughs, biomedical breakthroughs, that were the result of the
Baye Dole Act that, that have led to commercialization of products.
Which because of commercialization have actually led, made them
accessible to people in hospitals and medical professionals across the
world. You know Taxol's a great one from Florida State. So the next
reason that you might think about it being important is it can be a
really important outcome of research. Only showed us, you know,
similar, only showed a similar slide. This is from a, the Association
of University Technology Managers website, just some of the affects;
what's gone on in universities, there's, actually they used the 45
billion dollars of research and expenditures. And out of that in 2006
there were roughly 700 new products. There's been about 4,300
introduced since 1998. There were 553 new start up companies that arose
out of all of this. Almost 13,000 licenses that yielded some income
were made. And so there's a lot of outcomes that come out of that.
Okay, the fourth one then is it enhances your research resources.
Another thing that people don't always understand, and as far as Texas
has another way to enhance your resources. Right things that you, I
forgot your first name already that I'd talked about. So, anyway, so
why do you care about your resources? If you care about federal funding
you're thinking, Oh my God, I gotta find some other sources of money.
This was from triple AS; this shows the federal funding over the last,
since 1976 in all the different agencies. It's hard to see. But most of
you care about the blue bars, that's NIH. You can see when NIH started
to double in 2001, and you can see that in real dollars NIH is going
down. And then of course, as NIH's funding has gone down in real
dollars, actually the number of proposals they getting have doubled.
It's not so easy to get funding anymore. And so another reason to think
about being, being, thinking about technology transfer and
commercializing your technologies, is it is a way to get other
resources to do the research that you want to do. And let me give you a
couple of examples of that. This is sort of in the grossest sense. So
as I mentioned, Baye Dole requires that universities put money back
into the research endeavor. And it's usually for, for most
universities, I don't know what M.D. Anderson's policy is, or
University of Texas, Texas is. But most universities put about 33% of
what they get in licensing income back into the inventor or the
inventors departments research at some level. So these are some players
that make a lot of money on top. The University of California's system
is the big winner. They had 193 million dollars in 2006 of licensing
revenue. So if you take about 1/3 of that, I don't know 60 to 65
million went right back in to the inventors local research environment.
It's a lot of inventors, but that's a lot of money to build your
research on. NYU similarly had a big number. But there's a school like
Wake Forrest, which has a good medical school, but you might not think
as a whole University of California system with 60 million dollars of
revenue, meaning that about 20 million has gone back into their
inventor's labs and research. And then you can see at Baylor and M. D.
Anderson the numbers aren't as staggering, but there's still a
significant amount of money going back into investor, inventors
research. And then as you start up companies people will invest in your
research. And so these are some companies that have started at Rice.
And you know, I've walked in towards the end of this, and so I don't
know all the, the full case studies. Nanospectra Biosciences is a
company that started Naomi Halas who's on the right there is a, is a
electrical engineer who developed something called nanoshells. So
little tiny particles that have a very thin metal coating, and then
sort of junk in side. But you can tune those little particles to very
specific wavelengths of infrared light to heat up. And they developed
the technology then for injecting these nanoshells in to tumor cells,
you can then put an infrared light, shine the person, those tumor cells
heat up and destroy only the tumor cells and nothing else. They've had
incredible, incredible results in mice, which formed a company. This
started with Naomi meeting a local venture capitalist who got, sort of,
very interested in the technology. Funded some of her research to get
it a little further. They realized that maybe Naomi didn't have the
temperament to be, start the company, so they brought in Jennifer West
who's one of Rice's superstar bioengineers. And Jennifer is now the
main scientific advisor of that company. And they are in, this is
actually, well it's in the sort of final stage of clinical, there's a
major clinical trial now, which is the last one before, I think, they
can go to market. But my main point is, because of this technology, and
Naomi's discovery, and talking with local people who are interested in
technologies, she was able to get significant funding to move this
technology forward. The second, the second point there is a fellow
named Bruce Wiseman, which is a totally different model, and is against
my point. But Bruce, as you know, Rice in a lot of ways you can argue
that nanotechnology started at Rice when, when Rick Smalley discovered
buckyballs, or at least reported buckyballs. Bruce Wiseman is, is
another, sort of, nanoscientist. And he's developed the best tool right
now to actually characterize nanoparticles. He ended up starting his
own little company, which he funded himself. And he has a little shop
over on Kirby where they make this nanoparticle machine. And he's not
been super successful, but he's, it's starting to be picked up by a lot
of the major nanotech and he's, you know, starting to get some
significant income, and getting his research noted. But I put Bruce up
there, because we just signed a deal with Bruce with another local
venture capitalist, who has a collaborator here at M. D. Anderson,
where they're gonna get significant research money to develop their
technology from, from a new local start up company. And then Richard
Gomer is a faculty member at Rice who had very strong technologies in,
in potentially developing therapeutic for fibroid diseases. And there
was a company that formed around him. And I don't have a lot of the
details of how that enhanced his research though. Here's a case from
Missouri that I know a little bit better. Habib Ziquani is a, is
an immunologist in the medical school with the University of Missouri.
He was your classic, basic scientist. He had 6 RO1 grants doing his
thing. One of his RO1 grants was looking at an immunotherapy for
diabetes. He developed one in mice, had incredibly successful results
in mice. Rice, the University of Missouri had a relationship with a
very early stage technology company called Allied Minds. Allied Minds
came in and funded his project with a million dollars to get it through
the proof of concept phase. And if it was successful in the proof of
concept phase they were gonna provide the money and the management to
bring that company to fruition. So he's in the end point now of,
probably in that second to last year now of using that million dollars
to develop his technology. But again, it sort of changed his whole
focus and his whole potential for what his research could do. Okay, so
the next one is that it enhances your research recognition. So the,
there's an institute called the Milken Institute, which reports on
technology transfer and, and commercialization for universities. And
they did a big report in 2006. And in that report they talked about how
well universities are doing commercializing stuff. And Rice was very
proud to discover that we were number, I think we were number 1 in the
country in the number of startups produced per research dollar that we
receive. We don't generate a lot of licensing income yet, but we had a
lot of startups. And my point is, but that, that atmosphere of being a
very innovative place in nanotechnology actually came back to help Rice
in many ways. And Small Times is the major trade journal in the
nanotechnology scientists, and they announced that Rice was the place
to be if you wanted to commercialize nanoscience. And that has helped
us attract investors, and helped us to attract research money as well.
Then these are just examples of faculty members who have been very
innovative, got their work out there, all are in the process of
patenting their technologies, and they've all received some very major
recognition, which has helped their career. So Michael Wong is a, is a
faculty member in Chemical Engineering. He just was named by
Smithsonian Magazine as one of a, I don't know how they came up with
this, 37 under 36 scientists in the, in the country. And he was
recognized for a new technology that can, that can clean water up. In
which he would now, or Rice is in the process of either marketing or
starting a company around. But again, tremendous recognition for him,
and it's helped his research career as well. Ching, Ching WaKiang is a
young, younger faculty member at Rice. She just developed a, a really
cool new technique with lots of commercial potential. Again, that was
picked up by Small Times. This, oh by the way, these have all happened
in the last 5 months since I've been here. So some of the fun parts of
coming to Rice and getting, taking credit for stuff I have nothing to
do with. And, and, but Ching Wa was named by Small Times as the best
small tech researcher of the year last year for this particular
technology. And again, that's been a major boost in her career and
ability to fund her research program. And then Vicky Coleman, who's a
senior faculty at Rice in Chemistry, she was named at Esquire's six
best and brightest women a, in a few months ago. And again, she has
another idea using nanoparticles that can remove arsenic from water.
And again, this is being patented by Rice and will hopefully be
commercialized. And then the really fun part is if you have a really
cool technology you could end up on TV. And so this, so there's a cast
at ER, there's a Rice faculty member Cariocous Ethinosio, actually he
was in the UT system at San Antonio where I think this technology was
developed. But he's moved here since. And he, he developed the
technology to do intraosseous infusions. So when you can't get the
intravenous tube into somebody when they're under trauma, there's a way
to get it in through the bone marrow. He invented a very cool, sticky
thing to do that. It's the basis of this company, Vita Care, which is
very successful. It's actually the third successful company that
Cariocous has developed. But in this case at VR, at VR they were
calling for the Vita Care instrument to save the patient, then it was
the major scene of this half hour part of ER. And so, you know, minimal
you can be, you can tell your colleagues that, you know, these tract of
people at ER were using your technology. And, and of course, there's
the issue of, you know, it's not bad to make money. And, and so, you
know, yeah. And so for all of us in the tech transfer game there's the
Porsche in the parking lot hypothesis. And that was, it's not as bad
now, and I don't know what it's like at M. D. Anderson, but a lot of
universities faculty, are like, ah man, we can't do tech transfer,
that's against, you know, everything we've learned in our academic
culture. You know, so there was the hypothesis that the first faculty
member that has a successful commercialized technology that parks the
Porsche in the parking lot, suddenly everybody's mind changes. And so,
then there's tons of examples of, you know, of people being successful.
I just, I know of one, and just to give you a sense, and it's, you
know, not, not, no it's not a big name person who's invented something
huge that you might know of. It's actually a really interesting story,
cause it emphasizes a lot of cool things that can happen to you if you
decide to commercialize something you're developing. So Jeff Phillips
is a, is in the Department of Surgery at the University of Missouri
Columbia. But Jeff is a pharmacologist. So I think that for those of
you that know something about certain medical schools and hospitals,
you can imagine the pecking order of a pharmacologist in a surgery
department. Okay? And Jeff wasn't, not even a 10-year track faculty
member. So in the Surgery Department at the University of Missouri at
this point was not even much interested in research. So Jeff, though,
was working with trauma patients and he was, and one of the challenges
he had with trauma patients was with those with ulcers. And the major
treatments for gastrointestinal acid reflux with acid problems were
things like Prilosec, which have the problem of being very acid
sensitive. So they need to be in a teracoating and get into the
intestine. And so they don't, they take a while to work. And Jeff found
they got stock in the feeding tube a lot, and he got frustrated. People
said you couldn't put them in a buffer, but Jeff figured out a way to
put them in a buffer. And so, not only was he able to get it directly
into the stomach with the buffer and have it work, it turned out to
have full effect on the first dose, and so, and so in a lot of way be
actually much more effective than Prilosec. And so he worked with the
University of Missouri Tech Transfer Office for a long time to sort of
get this commercialized. We actually licensed it to a start up, which
may or may not have been a smart thing to do. That start up was called
Santorus. They, they got rid of all their other pharmaceutical
technologies and focused on this one. Zagarieta's now a product
you can buy both as a prescription, and they actually now have an over
the counter, and the company has sales projections hopefully for the
next year between 100 and 200 million and growing. But it's still
unclear whether AstraZeneca is ever gonna give up that space. So we
don't know, but nonetheless, so here's Jeff, sort of a low person in
the surgery department, nobody paying any attention to him,
commercializes this technology. Over the 4 years that I was at Missouri
that technology brought in over 15 million dollars. So that meant 5
million dollars to the Department of Surgery, which didn't have a lot
of money, and 5 million dollars to Jeff, actually. So Jeff is now doing
much better. And Jeff has, has the likelihood of having 5 million
dollars a year for the next 20 years, or more, coming in from this
technology. So he's doing well. Also the department of Surgery has
given him new lab space and invested a lot more money in his research.
And he has a much higher prominence in the department, which also
changed its whole focus with a new chair on research. So a couple of
things happened. Well my point was, you know, you don't have to be a
big name person for this to be really, really meaningful in your life.
And then in the other part he's invented a drug that actually works a
lot better than, than the a, and I'm forgetting the name, the a, the
kind of inhibitors these drugs are, cause it just fell out. But he's
invented really the best techno, technologically the best one of them.
And whether it's able to win in the marketplace we'll, we'll see. And,
of course, Jeff is now spending lots of new time inventing new things
with his newfound freedom and newfound research dollars that he has to
do. And then the final two points, which I think for all researchers
what you really, really care about is you want your research to change
your field, and you want your research ultimately to change the world.
You know, and I think from Rice, you know, what I know David Leebron
would like to talk about is the researcher that, you know, helped cure
cancer. And I'm sure John Mendelsohn would like to talk about the same
thing. And if you make a lot of money from it that's great, but really
the exciting thing is you changed the world. And so, you know, that
takes a little longer. So I went to the inventors hall of fame and just
thought of a couple of people, you know, you think about, who were
working basic research and decided to patent their stuff and how they
changed the world. So this is Robert Ledily he invented, he developed
the first patent for CAT scans. And it was somebody started, you know,
working on imaging technology and tomographic stuff, which I'm sure at
the time was pretty arcane, and developed the CAT Scan. And of course,
now we have a totally whole diagnostic tool to change cancer, cancer
diagnostics. And he did this when, now I'm trying to think of where
here way, which is on here somewhere, when he was at Georgetown. Oh you
know, here's another case of another, I'm trying to think of which one
this is. Oh yeah, this is MRI. Detecting cancer with MRI. Another case.
I mean MRI was just sort of basic physics research at one point, you
know, looking at the nuclear, the nuclear properties of atoms; suddenly
the most important diagnostic tool that we have now. You want to talk
about changing the world. And again, it's sort of, you know, a
scientist who was working, this case he was at the State University of
New York Downstate Medical Center when he, when he patented this, and
then he started a company to actually manufacture the MRI scanners. So
again, I mean it would be fun to have a change. And one of the last one
I want to think about is Kary Mullis who won, who won the Nobel Prize
for developing the polymerase chain reaction. I mean you want to talk
about changing the world, is the ability to replicate the DNA you want
to replicate; just completely changed biology. I mean prior to this we
weren't even; we were in the dark ages. And this now changed our
ability, you know and, if we ever are able to succeed in personalized
medicine, I mean this is gonna be the tool, the basic tool that allowed
that to happen. So not only did he make a lot of money and start major
companies, PCR is a major technology, but really the world was changed
forever. And that's my final slide. And so you think about as you take
this course, you should get excited about innovating and
commercializing. You should be in our office very day with new ideas,
because of all these reasons. It's the center; it's the center of your
universe. It's the future of the country you live in. It's your duty if
you get federal funds. It will enhance, it's a great outcome of
research. It'll enhance your ability to do research. You'll be more
recognized. And hopefully you too can go home at the end of your career
and think, My God, I really changed the world, because I was able to
get a technology commercialized and then be, and that, because I got it
commercialized people could actually use it. So thanks very much.
Hopefully that gets you excited to hear the next presentation.
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