Monday, February 11, 2008

Harvard names Keith to run $1.3M tech transfer fund

By Ryan McBride

While behind some of its peers in royalty income, Harvard University has racked up some recent wins in its effort to develop more of its life sciences research into medical products that benefit the public.

Harvard has lagged MIT and the University of Massachusetts in revenue from licenses in recent years. Yet the Ivy League stalwart's new Accelerator Fund, intended to lift the commercial pedigree of faculty research in life sciences, has led to a major license to New York biotech Egenix Inc.

And this week Harvard planned to announce the launch of a second round of funding for its Accelerator Fund, providing $1.3 million to faculty members this year to fund the well-chronicled void between government research grants and venture investments. The university at the same time has named alumnus Curtis Keith, who is leaving his senior vice president of research post at Cambridge biotech CombinatoRx Inc., to manage its new fund.

"Without bridging the development gap, and providing assistance to these projects to get to this point, a number of technologies would not benefit the public -- especially in the life sciences," said Isaac Kohlberg, a senior associate provost and chief technology development officer at Harvard. Kohlberg took over Harvard's Office of Technology Development in 2005, charged with improving the profile of technology transfer at the university, as he had done in prior roles with top research institutions such as New York University.

The Accelerator Fund, launched last year with $6 million in private donations, is among the latest in a series of campaigns at universities in the Boston area and beyond to advance academic research to a point at which the technology is commercially viable. Those universities include Boston University, MIT and UMass. And similar efforts have begun at the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center (MTTC), a state-funded nonprofit in Boston, and Boston's Partners HealthCare System, which manages Massachusetts General Hospital and other research hospitals in the Boston area.

"All institutions are going to be looking at how they can do this," said Abigail Barrow, director of the MTTC. "In some ways (the funds) are a catalyst in the commercialization process."

The Deshpande Center at MIT, for instance, has funded faculty and student research that has led to the creation of at least 10 startups, which have raised more than $88 million in venture capital and brought products to the market, according to a recent study by an entrepreneurship nonprofit, the Kaufman Foundation, of Kansas City, Mo. The center, formed in 2002, provides $1.3 million in annual grants for research in all fields at MIT.

At BU, there are several sources of funding for projects that advance faculty inventions toward the market, said Michael Pratt, director of corporate business development at BU. The university's Ignition Award Program, for example, was launched in May 2006 based on a previous fund there and provides faculty with a total of $300,000 broken into $25,000 to $50,000 grants to bring technology to a point where it can be licensed or spun off into a startup.

For Harvard, the Accelerator Fund is one method of raising its stature among other leading research schools. A popular measure of tech transfer success is licensing income, and there MIT was tops in the Bay State with $43.5 million in fiscal 2006 revenue, trailed by UMass with $27.2 million, and then Harvard with $20.8 million, according to annual figures from the nonprofit Association of University Technology Managers in Illinois.

Harvard's Kohlberg, however, said that some universities differ in how they calculate licensing income, making it a poor measure of tech transfer activity. His office noted that major licensing deals at Harvard jumped from 17 in 2006 to 25 last year, and 12 companies were spun out of the university during those two years. Still, the university said licensing income was $12.5 million in fiscal 2007, a steep drop from the $20.8 million reported in 2006.

While UMass has grown its licensing income in recent years with popular patents in such fields as RNA-interference, Harvard has not been as fortunate. Harvard officials said the university has seen a dramatic drop in revenue over the past two years from its license for Cardiolite, a diagnostic for coronary disease, with a patent due to expire last month. The Cardiolite patent alone brought Harvard $40.4 million in revenue from 2003 to 2005.

Yet Kohlberg said the primary goal at Harvard is to commercialize its technology for the benefit of patients and not to generate income. The license to Egenix, for example, will hopefully lead to new therapies for cancer based on research from Harvard Medical School.