WSU seeks more tech transfers-School’s patent filings up; plans made for Spokane intellectual properties office

In what’s said to be an important building block in the region’s drive to
create a biotechnology center here, the number of U.S. patent applications
filed by Washington State University’s intellectual properties arm has
jumped markedly in the last three years.

By Addy Hatch
OF THE JOURNAL OF BUSINESS

What’s more, the nonprofit WSU Research Foundation, which manages
WSU’s intellectual properties, is considering opening a branch office at the
Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute (SIRTI), says
Leona Fitzmaurice, executive director of the foundation. She says such an
office would create tighter connections between Spokane-area businesses
and the technological innovation taking place at Eastern Washington’s
largest university,
While Fitzmaurice says discussions of such a branch office are in the
“very early stages,” the talks also call for SIRTI to open a branch office at
WSU, says Patrick Tam, executive director of that organization. Such an
office would help SIRTI identify marketable research taking place in
Pullman and “interact proactively with researchers,” he says.

The closer connections between WSU research and Spokane businesses
jibe with recommendations made in a recently released study on creating a
robust biotechnology economy here. Sources at WSU and in the biotech
industry here say the importance of such connections, and of a vibrant
research pipeline at WSU, can’t be understated.

Patrick Jones, director of the Biotechnology Association of the Spokane
Region, says, “If you have a very thin trickle of discoveries and then a thin
trickle of transferring those discoveries, it’s difficult to imagine that a region
can enjoy some commercial success (in biotechnology).” It’s far better to
have a larger flow of technology transfer, he says.
James Petersen, WSU’s interim vice-provost for research, says, “An
important byproduct of education and research is economic
development—it’s not our main purpose but it’s a result that happens
whenever we’re educating students and doing cutting-edge research.”

Two-thirds in bioscience

The WSU Research Foundation filed applications for an average of 74
patents each fiscal year from 2000 through 2002, Fitzmaurice says. In the
three-year period from 1997 through 1999, the research foundation filed
an average of 51 patents per year, she says.
Fitzmaurice says that about two-thirds of WSU’s patent applications are
for bioscience technology, and despite the fact that they emanate from the
school’s veterinary science, agriculture, and chemistry programs, many
have applications for human health.
“There’s basic research that’s generating good technology even in the
absence of a medical school,” she says.

One example can be found in Spokane, at Bio-OriGyn LLC, a
biotechnology company that was founded by two WSU researchers in
1994 to commercialize their research. Currently, Bio-OriGyn holds five
patents, has launched products for human and animal infertility, and is
getting ready to introduce to market later this year a gel to help infertile
couples conceive.

Mandate to license

Fitzmaurice, who was hired by the foundation in January 2000 from the
University of Florida’s office of technology licensing, says one of her
mandates at WSU has been to make technology licensing “a serious
component of what the university was about.”

While the university’s patent activity is on the rise, she says WSU still is
“right about in the middle now in terms of our peer institutions.”
Jones says Fitzmaurice’s hiring was a positive move for WSU.
“WSU traditionally has not given many resources to the research
foundation and that appears to be changing. I think historically we can say
that office has operated with a real low profile and, I think you can say, a
low commitment from the university’s past administrations.”

WSU isn’t alone in beefing up its intellectual-property activities.
At Eastern Washington University, in Cheney, technology development
and transfer “certainly is an area that we’re looking to increase,” says Ruth
Galm, assistant vice president for grant and research development.

EWU currently has one patent application pending for “an apparatus
that’s in prototype,” she says. The patent—which, if granted, would be the
university’s second—stems from research grant of more than $1 million
from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, she says.
That’s the kind of thing EWU’s president, Stephen Jordan, wants the
school to do more of, Galm says.

“His vision (is) for increasing our applied research agenda and outreach,
and one of the ways we can do that is by working with local companies in
research and development,” she says.
Both schools are following a national trend. Federal legislation passed in
1980 required universities to attempt to commercialize technologies that
arise through federally funded research, which makes up the majority of
research conducted at many universities, including WSU.

A study of technology-transfer activities conducted by the Council on
Governmental Relations, a New York-based association of research
universities, says, “During the past two decades, universities have surprised
everyone, including themselves, with the tremendous success in licensing
their research results for commercial application.”

The University of California system of schools, for example, had total
sponsored research expenditures (i.e., paid for through federal or business
grants) of $2.1 billion in 2000, according to an annual licensing survey
conducted by the national Association of University Technology Managers
Inc., based in Northbrook, Ill.

The University of Washington, in Seattle, was fourth highest on that list,
with sponsored research expenditures of $652 million in 2000, the most
recent year for which figures are available, the survey says.

The University of Idaho’s sponsored research expenditures that year
were $50 million, while Montana State University’s were $61 million.

WSU wasn’t included in that survey because the data that it would have
submitted for inclusion were “grossly inaccurate,” Fitzmaurice says.
Since then, the foundation has fixed its database, and Fitzmaurice says the
university will be included in the association’s future surveys. She adds that
WSU’s sponsored research in 2000 totaled $86 million, based on the new
calculations.

Keeping it at home

Jones, of the Biotechnology Association here, says he’d like to see WSU
and other schools favor local companies when licensing their technologies
to private businesses.

The recent biotech-economy study sponsored by WSU, the regional
chamber, Intec (the Inland Northwest Technology Education Center), and
Inland Northwest Health Services, says that licensing technologies to the
“highest bidder” rather than to a local company is a “significant barrier” to
the development of any area’s biotech industry.
Says Lewis Rumpler, Intec’s vice president and director of biomedical
technology, “We’d like it commercialized, but commercialized locally.”
Fitzmaurice says the WSU Research Foundation doesn’t have any
control over that.

“It’s mandated by federal law,” she says. “As long as there’s federal
funding we must make the technology available nationwide.”
Rumpler says Intec and some of its partners would like to work at the
state level to ease those regulations and encourage a local preference for
technology transfer.

The situation also could be helped by the eventual establishment of a
WSU Research Foundation branch office here.
With a Spokane presence, the research foundation will more easily be
able to “identify potential licensees for technologies created by WSU
employees and to canvass Spokane companies for their technology needs
and interests,” Fitzmaurice says.

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