Entrepreneurs should regain their “technical amazement ability”
ByNormand Saint-Hilaire

Silicon Graphics, Inc., a large Mountain View, California, company which is a world leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage, has integrated to its flagship server and visualization systems a mechanism developed by Trioniq, a private entrepreneurial company from Saguenay, Canada.

Trioniq’s MakinaBOX is a patented mechanism that enables the insertion and extraction of standard electronic cards—PCI, PCI-X, PCI Express, ISA, etc—without having to open the computer casing. The device is designed to facilitate insertion and extraction of boards so no special technical assistance is required.

An advisor specializing in technology transfers, Normand Brault, advises Trioniq and many other small and medium size enterprises (SME’s) like it. He believes that, unlike Trioniq, generally, SME’s  fail to reap the full benefit of their technological advances.

Lost ideas

“Entrepreneurial businesses are often very creative,” says Brault to Birchbob Bulletin. “But do they really profit from their creativity? No, they don’t,” he answer’s himself.

Why not?

“Simply because entrepreneurs have often lost their ability of amazement in contemplation of their own discoveries.”

Entrepreneur-managers are often too taken by the day to day operation of their businesses. “They just get discouraged by the supplementary tasks which would require the development of the full potential of the ideas and discoveries they come across.”

Brault says he sees on a regular basis many innovations that just don’t make it to the market: “Their owners fail to protect their intellectual property. They simply wont even try to find out if their new application could have any use to others.”

“Paradoxically, these people work hard to find solutions to their very own internal problems. Once they have found innovative answers, they put them into application in their own shop and – to often in my mind – that’s it. End of the line. It just stops there.”

“As if an apple grower invented a machine to pick apples that could also pick oranges. But  that inventor wouldn’t bother making the orange grower know about it, depriving himself from royalties and the orange grower from the benefit of automation…”

“Its everywhere the same,” expresses the expert. “Technology transfers are just not made and minor applications are just reinvented over and over again, at great cost. Across the world, there is aid and funds available to finance R&D, but very little to help identify and transfer existing technologies. So much so that it is often easier to opt for R&D rather than to look out for existing solutions.”

A more profitable open approach

Brault believes it doesn’t have to be that way. Entrepreneurs and society in general would profit enormously from an open approach to their own technological advances, rather than the closed one he described.

Case in point: Dupont’s attitude toward its own discovery of the synthetic silk fiber – nylon. “Once they had protected their invention with a patent, they straight away offered production licenses to textile mills and other chemical companies. They also invited all to engage in collaborative research and development efforts to expand the number of nylon made products.”

What happened at that instant is that Dupont’s plastic research team went from a few dozen people to many thousand…The rest is history.

Co-opting advice

Brault is associated whith the Groupement des chefs d’entreprise (Website in French only), an organization that brings entrepreneurs together to share experience on business management and ownership. The Groupement also operates an online bank of advice on a vast array of business topics. Members who need more can also consult with experts in different disciplines. Normand Brault advises on maters relevant to technology transfers, license agreements, franchising, patent management, trade marks, copyrights and industrial secrets.

The Groupement presently totals 1,200 business owners or their heirs, grouped in 155 clubs. The movement intends to expand internationally. “We are presently translating all our material into English,” says Pierre Beaulieu , the Groupement’s executive vice-president general manager. “We frequently host visitors from all over the world who are interested in our experience. There is no equivalent elsewhere.”

Brault is also on a list of advisors whose services are supplied to businesses through the  Canadian Technology Network, a government agency.

Back to the headlines

LAMP Vaccine Technology: lessons on making it in the Wild Wild West of science
ByChristine Chalmers

A discovery born in a university lab is growing bigger: LAMP, a new antigen presenting design developed by Dr. Tom August, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, uses the lysosome-associated membrane protein (LAMP-1) to boost immune system response to DNA-encoded vaccines as a means to prevent and treat a variety of diseases from cancer to infectious disease and HIV.
                                                                                                            
To be effective, a vaccine must be able to induce an inflammatory response and in the case of cancer, to prevent weak antigens from going unnoticed and unrecognized as foreign by dendritic cells.  This response can be due to a weak inflammatory response or from secreting immunosuppressive factors that compromise the immune response. That’s where LAMP comes in. LAMP-1 is an intracellular trafficking protein that improves the effectiveness of DNA-based vaccines by delivering the encoded protein antigen to the class II major histocompatibility complex processing pathway (MHC II), thereby enhancing the immune system’s recognition of foreign matter.  DNA-encoded antigens cannot efficiently access this pathway, and are therefore limited in their ability to activate the CD4+ T-cells needed to enhance the immune response and generate T-cell memory. LAMP-containing vectors have proven to be effective in generating CD4+ T-cell responses in a variety of viral vaccine systems, including HIV, Dengue Fever, SARS and in a cancer vaccine construct with telomerase as the protein target.

In fact, Bill Hearl, a biochemist who is part of the team developing and marketing the LAMP platform, says that in clinical trials at Duke University, 19 out of 20 cancer patients responded to the human telomerase vaccine therapy, reducing their PSA levels to approximately normal levels and eliminating circulate tumor cells during the treatment period.

 “None of the patients had any adverse side effects,” he adds “so these are very exciting results.”

Despite the promise of this groundbreaking technology, marketing has been a difficult process. Dr. August, who discovered the platform at Johns Hopkins, saw great opportunities for expansion. LAMP has been the subject of over 50 research articles and has been utilized to generate positive results to many important antigens including HIV, SARS, West Nile Virus and Dengue Fever.   He recognized that is was time to expand beyond the University and to get LAMP-based vaccines into the clinic.  However, financing and licensing issues made this a difficult goal and that’s how Bill Hearl got involved in the project.

“Tom had been working on it for sometime, and he was looking for a way to get it out commercially. I suggested that we establish a joint venture company between Capital Genomix, the company I was working with at the time, and Johns Hopkins University. This new company was to be the business entity dedicated to managing these patents.”

The patent on the technology was issued in 1998 and an early effort to license the technology to a start up company did not result in the development of a viable business.    Thus, they effort had to overcome the residual effects of the first licensing effort.  Despite these hurdles,  Hearl has  managed to work with the Inventors and the licensing team at JHU to get the new company, Immunomic Therapeutics off the ground.  He learned a lot from his experiences and says the main challenge of starting up a company is finding the necessary funding. He offers the following advice to anyone just starting out:

“Look at building a good solid business proposal before you approach the licensing agency. One of the major issues that technology transfer offices consider when issuing licenses is their ability to recover the legal costs of prosecuting the patent. All the tech transfer offices want to be a zero cost burden – or even a profit center  - on their university, so you need to include a plan for repaying the cost of the patent.”

Hearl says that if the university you are working with does not have an outside resource to help start-up companies, it would be worthwhile to go to a local business development agency and have your business plan reviewed free of charge.

“They’ll provide feedback and tell you whether you have any chance at obtaining funding,” he says.
 
These lessons, which Hearl and his team learned the hard way, are now paying off. In fact, the LAMP-based prostate cancer vaccine with the telomerase marker is moving into the next round of clinical trials with the hope that it will receive FDA approval within the next few years.

“Telomerase is a very interesting marker,” says Hearl. It’s an enzyme that restores chromosome tips to full length. Telomerase usually only exists in the closed system of male reproductive tissue, and is not normally present in any other healthy cells. However, cancer cells have telomerase, which is one of the reasons why these cells don’t die. This makes it an attractive target for a cancer vaccine.”

In addition to cancer, Hearl’s team is also developing ways to use LAMP technology to treat infectious diseases, including HIV.
 
“HIV treatment is a very interesting part of our business concept and one of the reasons we created of our company, Immunomic Therapeutics Inc. There are many different strains of HIV, and using all these catalogued strains, you can look for sequences which will bind into the MHC binding cleft, then pull them out and put them in sequence. So, what you are doing is building a vaccine that is going to be effective across all strains of the virus.”

Clinical trials of the LAMP HIV vaccine system are also expected to take place soon.
The company is currently raising funds for testing and may be receiving funding to carry out a phase-I clinical study in Brazil in the near future.

“It looks like the Brazilian government has issued a grant to help fund for this purpose, so if we can get that started, it would be really exciting,” he says.

But, financing isn’t the only equation. Marketing also remains a constant challenge. Hearl’s team now has to convince pharmaceutical and biotech companies active in the vaccine area that LAMP technology can significantly improve the performance of their vaccines.

“Right now we are planning on using a major part of our fund raising round to put together a team dedicated to building collaborative relationships with these companies,” says Hearl.

He adds that a lot of companies are reluctant to shift gears towards a new technology when they have already invested considerable energy in their existing technology.

“Adding another technology creates additional time constraints, but on the other hand, if that improves the performance of their vaccine, they should be very much in favour of it.”

Although the company’s main objectives at this point are to prioritize disease targets for which they already have data and to work with companies that are already developing DNA-based vaccines, a second-tier objective is to pick one or two vaccines that they find particularly promising and use them for in-house development. But business is not the only objective - philanthropy is also high on the list:

Back to the headlines

Innovation commercialization : a literature review
By Sébastien Lévesque

This month, BirchBob suggests you ten documents available online for free. They come from 5 countries and give access to more than 500 pages of relevant informations. Short descriptions enable you to choose those which correspond best to your interests.

If you would like to contribute to the content, please contact us at:
info@birchbob.com

Mind to Market: A Global Analysis of University Biotechnology Transfer and Commercialization
In this study, Milken Institute researchers examine the biotechnology transfer process taking place at universities, from knowledge creation to technology transfer and early-stage commercialization. A key focus of the investigation is the role played by technology transfer professionals.
USA / Ross DeVol and Armen Bedroussian - Milken Institute / September 2006 / 320p.

Co-Opetition and Prelaunch in Standard-Setting for Developing Technologies
In this paper, Tobias Kretschmer and Katrin Muehlfeld show that even prior to market introduction of a new technology, the timing of decisions is important and that firms have to weigh up the cooperative and competitive elements of pre-market choices. The authors also show that the option to precommit to a technology before it is fully developed can be profitable for network technologies.
UK / Tobias Kretschmer and Katrin Muehlfeld - Centre for Economic Performance / August 2006 / 49p.

Pool of Patents and Follow-up Innovations
Basic innovations are often fundamental to the development of applications that may
be developed by other innovators. In this setting, Corinne Langinier investigates whether patent pools can rectify the lack of incentives for developers to invest in applications. Following Green and Scotchmer (1995), the author also wonders whether broad basic patents are necessary to provide enough incentives for basic innovators. The author shows that patent pools are more likely to be formed with patents of very different breadth, or patents of similarly wide breadth. Further, even though patent pools rectify the problem of developers’ incentives, they may reduce the incentive for doing basic research.
USA / Corinne Langinier – Iowa State University / July 2006 / 29p.
 
What do we know about Firm's Research Collaboration with Universities? New Quantitative and Qualitative evidence
This paper by Anders Broström and Hans Lööf provides an integrated view of knowledge transfer between university and industry by combining two different approaches. A positive influence, in terms of increased propensity to apply for patents and an increased share of sales related to innovative products, was found for large manufacturing firms. For the full set of manufacturing firms (including small firms) the indications on positive effects are clearly less robust, and for firms in non-manufacturing sectors, no evidence on a positive influence from collaboration could be found.
Sweden / Anders Broström and Hans Lööf - The Royal Institute of technology, Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies / August 2006 / 28p.

Innovation = invention + commercialization: a systems perspective
This paper by T. A. Brzustowski describes the process by which inventions derived from basic university research in science and engineering are commercialized. The process is described in terms of two systems: an invention system and a commercialization system.
Canada / T. A. Brzustowski – Optimum online / September 2006 / 7p.

Appropriability and Commercialization: Evidence from MIT Inventions
Exploiting a database of 805 attempts by private firms to commercialize inventions licensed from MIT between 1980 and 1996, the authors explore the influence of several appropriability mechanisms on the commercialization and termination of projects to develop products based on university inventions.
USA / Emmanuel Dechenaux (Kent State University), Brent Goldfarb (University of Maryland), Scott Shane (Case Western Reserve University), Marie Thursby (Georgia Institute of Technology and NBER) – Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research / June 2006 / 39p.

Strategic Niche Management as an Operational Tool for Sustainable Innovation: Guidelines for Practice
Strategic Niche Management provides an evolutionary analytical framework that has proven useful for the analysis of success and failure in the introduction of radical innovations in fields such as wind energy, biomass, public transport systems and food production. This paper takes one step towards greater operationalisation of SNM as a practical tool for managing the development of radically new technologies.
The Netherlands / Marjolein Caniëls & Henny Romijn - Eindhoven Centre for Innovation Studies, The Netherlands / March 2006 / 25p.

Capturing Benefits from Tomorrow’s Technology in Today’s Products: The Effect of Absorptive Capacity
In this paper, Daniel Snow proposes and examines a specific means by which firm R&D experience may be helping firms to improve their current-technology products: Firms that conduct
future-technology R&D may be better at adapting components from related future technologies for use in their current-technology products. The author uses patent data to test whether automobile carburetor suppliers with higher levels of future-technology R&D activity are better at adapting components from related future technologies for use in carburetors.
USA / Daniel Snow - Harvard Business School / July 2006 / 30p.

U.S. Universities’ Net Returns from Patenting and Licensing: A Quantile Regression Analysis
In line with the rights and incentives provided by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, U.S. universities have increased their involvement in patenting and licensing activities through their own technology transfer offices. Only a few U.S. universities are obtaining large returns, however, whereas others are continuing with these activities despite negligible or negative returns. The authors assess the U.S. universities’ potential to generate returns from licensing activities by modeling and estimating quantiles of the distribution of net licensing returns conditional on some of their structural characteristics.
USA / Harun Bulut and GianCarlo Moschini - Center for Agricultural and Rural Development
Iowa State University / September 2006 / 25p.

The Commercialization of Open Source Software: Do Property Rights Still Matter?
This paper analyzes the role of property rights in the open source model, with a particular focus on the effectiveness of the appropriation mechanisms that the open source model uses in lieu of intellectual property rights. The author makes two main points. First, he argues that open source’s commercial success is intertwined with its incorporation into traditional commercial value chains. Second, he argues that despite open source’s distributed development process, open source in the real world is likely to support an increasing concentration in the software industry.
USA / Ronald J. Mann - The University of Texas School of Law / September 2006 / 44p.