Banu Onaral spent the first part of her career finding ways to glean information from complex sounds and optical signals. After demonstrating their potential usefulness for sorting out biological signals, however, those inventions would be set aside. "We would get proof of concept, grant the student a degree, then wash our hands of it," says Onaral, who directs the School of Biomedical Engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "Most of my career was that way." Onaral has now shifted her focus to technologies that might actually find a use.

"One day it hit me that many of the discoveries made in my own lab were still on our shelf," Onaral says. "That was a revelation." She responded by creating a translational biomedical research program, which in 2005 won a grant from The Wallace H. Coulter Foundation for $2.9 million over five years. The grant will help move medical technologies from the lab to the clinic.

The gap Onaral faced between her academic inventions and the marketplace pervades the Greater Philadelphia region. Business and academic leaders want to change that. And while transferring technology from universities to businesses is a challenge anywhere, an October 2007 report confirmed that the Greater Philadelphia region "struggles to connect the innovative ideas of its universities and research centers to new private-sector development and growth," despite its numerous assets.¹ The report, conceived by the venture capital working group of the region's CEO Council for Growth, compares the Greater Philadelphia area to peer regions with strong life science industries and suggests strategies for advancing the region's commercialization potential.

With so many excellent universities and research institutes in the area, more innovations should be ending up in the hands of entrepreneurs who can develop them into products, the report finds. In response, business leaders are beginning to make plans to attract more venture capital and more entrepreneurs to the region. Many of the area's research institutions are finding more effective ways to connect inventors with biotech and pharmaceutical businesses.

Interest in promoting life sciences in the region came into focus when the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) held its international meeting in Philadelphia in 2005, according to Russel Kauffman, president and CEO of the Wistar Institute and a member of the CEO Council for Growth. At that time the Milken Institute, an economic think tank, released a report that was commissioned in 2003 by several area organizations to assess Greater Philadelphia's position relative to other life science hotspots such as Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and North Carolina's Research Triangle.²

The Greater Philadelphia region ranks at or near the top on many measures, including jobs, federal funding for research, and sheer brainpower. On a few of the measures, such as new startup companies, the region lags behind. Although venture capital investments amounted to approximately $500 million in 2003, they paled when compared to the San Francisco Bay Area's $7 billion. This would indicate that the region's academic power hasn't yet been put to optimal economic use.

"There appears to be a real shortage of entrepreneurs who can take the initiative in starting up new companies," Kauffman says. That may be why venture capital, which should be abundant along the wealthy eastern seaboard, hasn't flowed toward Greater Philadelphia in larger amounts. The report recommended fostering "a culture of entrepreneurship."

To do that the business leaders have decided they need a "clubhouse," a single place for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to meet. "In areas that have been successful, there's always been at least one place you can go to get this done, if not a physical place, then a virtual entity," Kauffman says. The CEO Council is currently deciding what sort of clubhouse it should create. (See "Navigating the Network".)

Steven Siegel, who licensed a drug-delivery system in 2006, might have preferred one place to shop as well. He invented the system as a medical resident at the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and shared it with multiple offices at the university. He traveled to the Food and Drug Administration to learn about drug applications, and he met with pharmaceutical representatives at conferences before he finally found someone interested in developing his technology.

Patients often fail to follow their doctor's directions for taking medications. So Siegel, who is now an assistant professor specializing in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, created a polymer that can be suffused with a drug and implanted to steadily release the medication.

Siegel stopped by Penn's technology transfer office several times before anyone took an interest in his invention. Once they saw the potential, they helped him patent his slow-release polymer, but it was left to him to find someone who might be willing to develop its commercial potential. "I realized that if it was going to happen, I would need to do it," he says.

Siegel was not able to sell the idea to several pharmaceutical companies, but while trying to do so he polished his pitch. Then a different office at the university introduced him to Jane Hollingsworth, CEO of NuPathe, a Conshohocken, Pa.-based specialty pharmaceutical company that develops treatments for neurologic and psychiatric diseases. They signed a deal, negotiated through Penn's technology transfer office, in August 2006.

Hollingsworth sees a cultural gap between business and universities that, if bridged, could streamline the technology transfer process. Licensing technology is only part of what a research institution does, and their tangled bureaucracies can hinder negotiations. To be successful, technology transfer must be a priority "all the way to the top" of the institution, Hollingworth says. If not, "there are too many competing interests for it to really work well."

When NuPathe licensed its first drug-delivery technology from biotech, the transaction went smoothly because the lines of responsibility were clear. Once both parties decided to proceed, negotiations moved forward rapidly. On the other hand, acquiring a license for Siegel's polymer proved thornier. "It took a lot of persistence," Hollingsworth says, noting that nailing down the agreement took nearly a year. Finding the right person to discuss particular parts of the agreement was difficult because it wasn't always clear who was authorized to make decisions, she says. The problem was exacerbated by high turnover in the technology transfer office at the time, she adds. "It's really hard to take advantage of what Penn has when you're caught in that revolving door."

Michael Cleare plans to change that. Recently hired to lead Penn's technology transfer office, Cleare plans new hires and new initiatives to more effectively move Penn's contributions beyond academic circles. Staff turnover has hampered efforts in recent years, he acknowledges, and it hasn't helped to nurture relationships with either the faculty or the business community, so Cleare plans first to turn that around. He also plans to draw on another strength at Penn: the well-regarded Wharton School. As interns in the technology transfer office, business students from the school will evaluate the potential of Penn's discoveries and patents. That experience should help create more biotech entrepreneurs.

Katherine Chou, who directs the technology transfer office at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, believes that academics must pay more attention to business concerns if their work is to find practical use outside the institution. Her office works to persuade faculty inventors of that. "Investigators want to get what they know will work to patients," she says. They often tell her that they do not care to profit from their inventions, but ignoring the financial angle is impractical, she tells them. The potential for making money from the invention must be made clear to potential investors, as no one will pay the cost of developing a technology unless they can be confident of a profitable market for it. Chou and her staff have developed a remarkably successful program. The institution ranked 20th on a measure of the quality and number of patents in a world-wide assessment of technology transfer at 683 research universities, according to a report by the Milken Institute in September 2007.³

The university's expertise and experience have been tapped to help other institutions develop programs. In June 2007 it received a Keystone Innovation Zone grant for $100,000 to help smaller regional universities - including University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and Widener University in Wilmington, Del. - establish technology transfer offices, Chou says. She also sends researchers seeking seed money to Ben Franklin Technology Partners and BioAdvance, both in Philadelphia and funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. "We leverage the economic development resources of the region," adds Chou. (See "Bridging the Gap" and "Barbara Schilberg".)

Finding money to support commercialization is most difficult at the earliest and riskiest stage of development. Many projects stall in the dangerous gap between the time that public funding for basic research ends and private investment kicks in. Although several publicly funded programs in Greater Philadelphia do provide seed money to startup businesses, a few institutions are finding new ways to ease a venture's birth.

The University of Delaware's Technology Park, a partnership between the university, the state, and industry, was created to incubate companies while they are just beginning, says the park's president, Michael Bowman. The park initially started in 1992 to promote composite materials that university researchers invented and developed with DuPont. When AstraZeneca's US headquarters located to Delaware in 1999, the park's focus shifted to the life sciences, Bowman says. The park now houses an academic research unit, the Delaware Biotechnology Institute.

The Lankenau Institute for Medical Research in Wynnewood, Pa., takes a different route to promoting commercialization. In no-cash deals the institute offers office space to startups in return for equity in their companies, says George C. Prendergast, president of the institute. The program is part of a trend, sometimes called "spinning in," of bringing startup companies back onto campuses. One example is CureDM, a biopharmaceutical company that two Lankenau faculty members started. The company is developing a peptide that stimulates the production of new insulin-producing cells in the pancreas as a treatment for diabetes. CureDM moved from Chester, Pa., to Lankenau's campus in September 2006.

Lankenau has also hired a team of researchers whose express purpose is commercial development. "It's the 'D' in the R&D," Prendergast says. That group, called the development lab, is organized as a for-profit center within the nonprofit institute, an arrangement that was difficult to negotiate legally, but which Prendergast says will help inspire efforts toward profitability. The lab will work to broaden applications of patents the institute already owns.

A trend toward developing technologies more fully within research institutions before spinning them out may make acquiring those technologies easier for businesses, and therefore more likely. Ten years ago university technology transfer offices would send a copy of a journal article or patent application to pharmaceutical companies and ask if they were interested in the technology, says Robert Smith, senior vice president for global business development at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. "Now technology transfer offices are trying to package opportunities in a way that's more attractive to industry," he says, by putting together pitches that make clear the benefits of a partnership or licensing deal.

Wyeth and other big pharmaceutical companies in the area such as GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca may contribute to the health of the life science business in the Philadelphia region in another way as well. As the spirit of entrepreneurship increases, Smith says, more people who have gained experience within these large companies will leave to lead startups of their own. Michael Brand, for example, left GlaxoSmithKline in 2004 after 30 years with the company and its predecessors to lead CardioKine, a Philadelphia-based specialty pharmaceutical company that develops drugs to treat heart disease.

Smith sees a growing reluctance of venture capital to spend money on early product development. Wyeth is stepping into that gap, by licensing more technologies directly from universities rather than waiting for biotech to develop them. "The early-stage licensing is what we consider to be our sweet spot," he says. Those opportunities can be tricky to see, however. Universities can help, Smith says, by working better with professors to make opportunities "more digestible."

Drexel University is working to package intellectual property to make the development opportunities more attractive to businesses. One way is to have the technology more fully developed and focused, says Robert McGrath, associate vice provost and executive director of the Office of Research Technology Commercialization. Drexel is leveraging its expertise in applied research to promote the development of commercially viable ideas from the start, by matching the clinical acumen of physician-investigators to the technical expertise of biomedical engineers.

"Clinicians know what the problems are, and they have ideas about how to fix them," McGrath says, "and nobody is better at responding to challenges than engineers." Together, they "will get problems addressed more easily and in a more creative fashion," he says. Having co-investigators with complementary talents will generate designs that address the realistic needs of patients and physicians.

One team, led by engineer Elisabeth Papazoglou and surgeon Michael Weingarten, has developed an imaging system to assess healing of the chronic and difficult-to-treat wounds that can result from long-term diabetes. That pleases the engineering school's director, Banu Onaral. This is one more technology that is unlikely to be left on the laboratory shelf.