Session 7-1: Technology Review Committee (TRC) at M. D. Anderson

M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Date: April 2008
Duration: 0 / 18:18

Stan Tucker, Ph.D., Director, Technology Discovery, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Narrator:

First speaker, Stan Tucker, Stan Tucker, Ph.D. He did his post doc here at M. D. Anderson, worked at M. D. Anderson, went outside and worked with the local industry, biotech industry and then came back. He worked with Martin. Oh, yeah, he was the CO.  So, there's a lot for us going on right here.  [Laughter]  So, yeah, I don't know what's going back.  This is relationships there.  But anyway, Stan, we were lucky to getting back to M. D. Anderson and he joined the Office of Technology Discovery with something like five years ago now and took over time the whole pharmaceutical collaboration part, and he's now very active in getting collaborations going, getting millions of dollars into M. D. Anderson to drive some of your projects.  He does that together with Liz [unintelligible] who sits in this room as well.  So, with that said, let me welcome Stan Tucker and he's gonna tell you all about what we call the TRC Funding that we have going here at M. D. Anderson.  Stan.

Stan Tucker:

Thank you.  Are we working, already?  Okay.  Thank you much.  So, Technology Review Committee and I think a number of you may already be familiar with this.  We are gonna go through this one pretty quickly so that we can get on to some of the other presentations that extends the field, us, you know again, Alli, Liz, myself, all as part of Office of Technology Discovery.  And, just to remind you about Office of Technology Discovery, we were formed in about 2001 as part of the Office of Translational Research, that's Dr. Bast, and really it was all about us now serving as a better more proactive faculty friendly interface for technology transfer which at Anderson is called Office of Technology Commercialization.  So, the kind of things we do is really provide the guidance and resources for you as inventors.  We do this in promotion of translational research.  We facilitate your commercialization and this Technology Review Committee is one means by which we aid and back your commercialization of your new discoveries, provide access then through potential funding, both this and other sources as you'll see as the day breaks out and connect you in some cases with external resources that you may need for additional development work.  So brief one about technology discovery and we have a web site as was shown on that title slide and so you can reach us internally here for M. D. Anderson through our web site and also learn a little more that way.  What we initially discovered when we started this operation, we started looking out what kind of things were missing?  Where did M. D. Anderson's technologies get slowed down or bogged down.  Why were they not progressing and we look back and a number of them have found that really what happens is in early stage, you can use your research money to move on like so far, and when it gets to the more advanced stage of really getting a solid proof of principle and a really good animal model and some solid animal model data and then starting some preclinical work, there's just no research funding for that.  You can't go to the NIH and ask them for that kind of money.  And, likewise, when industry or a company is interested in developing your product, they're not gonna invest much money on you at a very early stage, when you're still trying to get your basic proof of principle studies done or if you have an idea of a device, if you don't have a working prototype device, they're not gonna give you much time.  So, we all talk about gap, funding gap and it has been calling here of the Valley of Death and other things, this is all what we're gonna talk about today, is how do we get you through the funding here?  How do we get you to a point where industries truly gonna be attracted and really put some money in and start moving you into clinical trials.  We as Technology Review Committee work at the very early stages of this and I think we arranged speakers today kind of in the order of increasing both magnitude of funding, but also as an increase in moving your product more and more towards development and closer to that final license or that real development in the clinic.  So we really developed this Technology Review Committee to fill that funding gap.  It's considered an investment by M. D. Anderson.  Again, it's not research money, you can go out and get research money in a multitude of ways, but, what we have is investment by the institution and we're really looking for projects that have of course meet the basics of scientific merit and if there's an unmet need, but which also have a true path to commercialization.  Something where the institution believes that there will be a return and the institution numbers on for TRC on what a return means is pretty low bar, it means you're gonna at least be able to pay the institution back what's invested.  They're not looking for a 10x return on everything that they do and then we've had a few cases where we think if it's just breaks even, we have accomplished the mission for the institution.  Their projects are really milestone and budget driven and as a part of a process that we have for bringing your Technology Review Committees and doing the preparation in bringing them into the full committee.  So, the TRC was actually started in about January of 2003 and it consists of a committee of about 30 total members.  Many of them high profile people and department heads and people at M. D. Anderson who really have been there and done that, who've really taken new products and license them and develop products.  Some of them have taken them all the way to market.  There are also a couple of intellectual property attorneys.  There are a couple of business leaders, CEOs from companies and a couple of venture capital individuals on this committee as well.  So, it represents not only the scientific background to help us make these calls, but also some business sense in looking at the projects that we're developing.  The project proposals themselves, we as an office, Alli, myself and Liz help you prepare your projects and we'll sit down with you up to four or five times prior to you actually bringing a project forward and we help you prepare your projects, clarify exactly what are the key milestones that you need next, what your real budget need for that and what kind of time lines are you gonna have to meet to advance to that next step.  So we work closely with you in developing these projects and we'd be your first stop if you think your eligible or this is something you're interested in, just give us a call.  We'll sit down and meet with you and talk about Technology Review Committee and what kind of projects we're interested in.  Basically, that committee makes the recommendation then to fund or not and that goes forward to the executives here which Dr. Mendelsohn, Mr. Leach and Ray DuBois and they give the final approval then for that funding.  The TRC was started with a philanthropic fund at 1.5 million dollars, and after three years we've pretty well used that and now are going on to additional money that the institution is seeing fit to continue to invest.  Our office over the past five years of being in existence has had more than 13,000 formal, what we call formal faculty contacts, but we have really sat down with investigators and spend an hour talking about your project, what your need are and how can we help you advance these.  And out of these discussions, we've put together about 73 true project teams and started talking about what a Technology Review Committee project would look like and from those 36, we're actually advanced and presented to the committee.  We don't try to bring you to the committee unless we really think you have a good chance of getting funding and we're not blocking you or stopping you from coming to the committee and you certainly have the right to do so as a faculty member if you wish, but we do have a way of helping you get in there and be successful and success is shown by 26 out of those 36 presented being funded.  What do those projects look like?  They break down to about nine of them being drugs, eight of them were devices, five of them were in the software area and four diagnostics, a total of about 1.75 million has been invested in these projects to this point.  To give you a sense of what kind of projects have been funded, one of them is an example of a drug that involves the siRNA and delivery of that siRNA.  The first it's been funded actually twice now through the Technology Review Committee, the first round was really to optimize the formulation that they had for this and it got them some broad IP claims, basically a platform for being able to deliver essentially any siRNA.  They developed analytical test methodology so that then they could get that toxicology and PK study done in the next step, so once they were successful with that initial round, they came back, presented to the TRC and were funded a second round now to complete all of their toxicology that's required for them to get to an I&D.  We expect them to then file an I&D later this year.  That total almost 240,000 dollars, but because it was done through mostly the resources internally at M. D. Anderson and pharmaceutical development center, if they've done this outside, it probably would have cost them at least about four times that.  So, we do have additional resources through the pharmaceutical development center and so forth and we can talk about that if you're ready to talk about a project in earnest.  Another project involved brachytherapy applicators, so a device.  This was a much lower bar and it only required about 30,000 dollars initially to develop a basic simple prototype with the right materials and the right type of design that through connection with an outsourcer and engineer that was external to the institution, this prototype device was built and now software is being used to optimize that device.  It has actually been licensed and as a note, once your project product is license, we can no longer touch it through the Technology Review Committee because all of this is part of our nonprofit operation at M. D. Anderson.  Plug-in software is another area that was funded through TRC.  So, it was a simple funding of building a piece of software that was already in MATLAB language but needed to be converted so they could be plug and play and not give away the software.  To give you really brief outline of what these successes look like now that we have about three to four years of experience with the TRC, we've now have some hard cash returns of at least about 850 plus thousand dollars of that funding that was put forth, returned in options and licenses from the PIs.  We understand that there have been a number of grants and SBIR's sponsored research that were enabled by the projects that were funded through TRC.  There has been external investments and at least one project to total a reasonable return.  I think a more than reasonable return if we're looking for simply break even and making a little.  We had new inventions created just by having these projects done.  We filed new patents based on some of the work that was done and startup companies and so forth.  So basically, an average investment at TRC has been in the 67,000 dollar range, if you average it over time.  We are seeing a trend towards more mature, bigger budgets as we develop things further down the pipeline where they require more pre I&D work.  And at this time, you're required actually to sign a waiver that you would return if your project is successful and start bringing royalties and money back that you would return to the pot of TRC the funding.  It's really too early to say that we're going to see royalty, but we do believe that there's gonna be a good chance of getting some royalties off of those that have already been licensed and that we'll see multiples in our return.  For you budding entrepreneurs, every company presentation you see a safe harbor statements of this is mine saying that basically you can take it for what it's worth.  Let me ask you if there's any question specifically about TRC.  We could stop and take them here.  Maybe if you have broader questions about funding in general, we could hold most of those till the end.

So, what is the--What is the typical use of these funds?  For what kind of purpose, like can we use this for high personnel or?

So what we typically see is mostly the supplies and things that you need in your lab to fund you.  We are not looking and the TRC does not view lightly you asking for a postdoc support for a year.  So, it's not like a research project.  Your budget is closely tied to the milestones that you set.  So, if you're asking for a software developer to work with you for three months, you get three months worth of money for a software developer unless that person is already here working on that project.  We are not looking for you to add to your salary or to add a post doc.  So, it's really very focused to just exactly what you need for that next key step.

So basically just for supplies?  Is that right?

It can be and has been for funding of people, time, if that's what's critically needed.

Okay.

And always case by case.

Yeah.  I have another question.  Like I'm a little bit confused like if I have a promising you know really compound should I contact your office first or should I contact the other office for patenting things.  Which office should I contact first?

So now, let's describe the disclosure process last time, a couple of times ago actually.  And so call us, call them.  If you wanna do a disclosure, them being the Tech Transfer Office, but call us too.  Make us aware, and if it's something that really fits to TRC, let's make an appointment and discuss it and we'll help you think about where your project really needs the next step of help.

Do you mean that if like we can start a project with your office without having some kind of like protection, IP protection?

So, this is actually a key point and I'm glad you asked that because we do not consider projects until you have done a disclosure setup.  We can get the technology transfer folks to look at this from the IP side and get an understanding of is there some genuine IP that can be protected here and they help us think about this in terms of the market and potential licensees and so forth.  So, we involve them closely in all of these projects and yes, we definitely want that disclosure and we don't typically form a formal team around you to help write and prepare your project unless we get that disclosure first.

Just quick question.  Just quick question.

Okay, question.  Yeah.

Is this made only for M. D. Anderson employees?

The answer is probably yes.  We would have to talk a little bit more in detail what would you have in mind and whether we have a collaboration with somebody else going, and then the Tech Transfer officers will deal together and see who's taking the lead.  But clearly, if this is just outside stuff now, I mean we're not doing that, but then we have to be involved somewhat.  I mean, this is an M. D. Anderson internal mechanism and we could fund all day long outside things that not get funded out there because it's pretty unique what we have here.