WSU RESEARCH FOUNDATION REINVENTS ITSELF
BYLINE: Bert Caldwell
The once-moribund Washington State University Research Foundation reached another threshold last week in its efforts to bring faculty inventions to the marketplace.
Five professors introduced breakthrough technology to investors who can help bring their work to the workplace, in the process creating new jobs and new revenue for the university. The presentations at the Riverpoint Campus were a first for the research foundation, which should not be confused with the WSU Foundation, which solicits and manages private contributions to the university.
The research foundation was created to foster technology with potential commercial applications. But activity had fallen to almost nil until Vice Provost Jim Pedersen was given a mandate to reinvigorate the organization. Two years ago, he brought Keith Jones in from Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties Inc. to take the helm.
Jones has done wonders building a staff, quadrupling foundation revenues and, most importantly, establishing foundation credibility with faculty members. Professor J. Suzanne Lindsey is among those who have benefited from the renewed effort.
She has exclusive rights to MIG-7, a genetic marker of solid-tumor cancers. Tests using MIG-7 could be used to detect such cancers and, eventually, target them for therapy.
Lindsey has presented her research at various meetings over the last two years, so far without finding the partner or investor that can take MIG-7 beyond the laboratory. But a new paper on the gene seems to be clearing up some confusion about its characteristics, and potential applications as a cancer fighter, she says.
Meanwhile, WSU has helped support her work with $28,000 from a $300,000 Cougar Gap Fund donated by the university, the Washington Research Foundation and the WSU Research Foundation.
Lindsey, a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, says the foundation's help has been critical since she joined the university in 2004.
"They've been an enormous improvement over my previous experience with technology transfer," she says.
Grant Norton, a professor in the Department of Mechanics & Materials, remembers the years when the foundation was all but invisible to faculty.
"Patents and inventions were really not something our university valued," he says. "It's just been a complete sort of 180-degree change."
Norton is forming a new company, GoNano Technologies, to commercialize his patented method for producing long, microscopic threads with potential applications in hydrogen storage and solar cells, or as a catalyst.
The technology could be licensed to other companies, Norton says, but ideally he would like a plant built in the Inland Northwest to produce the threads. That could cost as much as $2 million.
"For us that meeting in Spokane was a very useful and important meeting," he says, adding that two investors who saw the presentation plan follow-up visits to Pullman to get a closer look at GoNano.
One is venture capitalist John Pariseau, who manages $3.5 million for WIN Partners LLC.
The foundation, by pre-screening faculty technology, saves investors the time and effort it would take to ferret out the promising technology WSU's hundreds of faculty members may be working on at any given time, Pariseau says. Even if the work is not far enough along to merit immediate investment, venture capitalists can monitor development until it reaches that threshold.
The enterprising Jones says investors can get even closer to early stage technology by contributing toward another $300,000 Gap pool that will underwrite more early-stage university research. He also hopes to create a separate $200,000 fund to take ideas like MIG-7 another step toward commercialization.
Although the money would be a gift, it gives contributors a first look at the university's best research, says Jones, noting the foundation was able to fund only half the proposals submitted for the first $300,000.
"We're getting quite busy," he says. "We're not where we need to be yet, but we're getting there."