New U of Washington vice provost links research, entrepreneurship-Severson wants to raise the profile of the university’s technology licensing program

University of Washington’s technology transfer program may be one of the best kept secrets in the Puget Sound region.

Most people probably don’t know that the university has generated an average gross of $21.6 million in a variety of technology licensing deals each year since 1999.

By:
Jeff Meisner
Puget Sound Business Journal

Since the start of the technology transfer program in 1953, more than 140 technology and life-sciences companies have been spun off from UW, both private and public.

But venture capitalists and entrepreneurs would like to see a higher profile for the program — and that’s just what James Severson, the new vice provost of intellectual property and technology transfer at UW, intends to do.

Severson, who is finishing up his duties as president of the Cornell Research Foundation, begins his term at the UW Jan. 1.

He is no newcomer to the ins and outs of brokering technology licensing deals.

At Cornell University, he is responsible for technology transfer from the Ithaca campus and the university’s Weill Medical College in New York City. Prior to his time at Cornell, Severson did the same job for the University of Minnesota.

With most of his contacts in academia, Severson said his biggest challenge will be establishing a closer relationship between the UW and Seattle’s technology and life-sciences sectors.

"I haven’t had any contact with the local business community," he said. "But there seems to be a sense that there isn’t enough collaboration between the university and entrepreneurs."

Severson is also making it a priority to encourage the faculty at the university to be more entrepreneurial.

"One challenge is going to be finding new ways to encourage the faculty to bring their inventions to us," he said. "The people on the faculty I’ve talked to seem to have a desire to be more entrepreneurial and have more transfer out of the university."

Natasha Srulowitz, a venture capitalist with the Kirkland branch of Garage Technology Ventures, said despite the fact that the university has produced 140 companies over the years, investors would like to see a stronger emphasis on spinoffs.

"It’s critical to the region," Srulowitz said. "Relative to areas like Silicon Valley, the UW hasn’t done a whole lot here. It should be used as a resource for investors the way the VC community in the Valley taps Stanford, UCLA and Berkeley."

Garage recently closed on a seed fund which includes the California Public Employees’ Retirement System as a limited partner.

One of CalPERS’ mandates for the new fund calls for Garage’s general partners to seek out emerging technologies developed at universities.

"So we’re particularly interested in what Mr. Severson will be doing at UW," Srulowitz said. "It’s not that the university doesn’t have a good engineering program. It’s an issue of corralling those resources."

Aside from increasing communication between the UW faculty and local entrepreneurs and investors, Severson’s main responsibility is to make sure any licensing deal brokered between the two is in the university’s best interest.

Steve Gailar, former chairman and chief executive at Micronics Inc. of Redmond, has worked with Severson before.

"Jim has been through this kind of business at a number of institutions before," Gailar said. "He has to do a good job of keeping the university from cutting a deal that may hurt it down the road."

The challenge in coming up with a fair deal for the university is that all the technologies Severson tries to commercialize are very early-stage, he said.

"That’s a tough negotiation because often these technologies are very young and unproven," Gailar said.

Micronics’ technology shrinks scientific experiments usually performed with test tubes down to a kit the size of a credit card, using miniaturized components and minute quantities of chemicals.

It was originally developed at UW in the mid-1990s and licensed out to Micronics in 1996.

Although most of UW spinoffs are private, the university has seen its fair share go public, including Rosetta Inpharmatics Inc., a Kirkland biotech that was bought in July 2001 by Merck Inc. for $540 million.

Corixa Corp., a Seattle-based cancer research company, and Microvision Inc. of Bothell, which makes retinal scanning display-based technologies, have also gone public.

Catherine Innes, director of educational research at the university, expects the gross amount of money generated by commercializations, bio-material transfer agreements and software distribution license to be down from 2002 by as much as 15 percent next year.

"One of our major patents is expiring and we’re waiting for a number of other technologies developed here to mature," Innes said. "And because of the down economy, we’re just doing fewer licensing deals."

http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2002/12/16/story7.html