© PETER HOEY COLLECTION/THEISPOT.COMFor the past two decades, Steven Dowdy, now a professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), has been investigating how the cell cycle stops and starts, a question key to understanding cancer. Along the way, Dowdy hit upon an efficient method for delivering large molecules into cells. The technique turned out to be useful for his cell-cycle research, but its application wasn’t limited to basic science. After he filed two patent applications on his methods in 1998 and 2001 and published related work in Science (285:1569-72, 1999), biotech companies began asking him to give talks on the techniques and their application to drug delivery. His group has since published more than two dozen papers on ways to escort large molecules into cells, obtained an additional patent and applied for multiple others, and founded three start-up companies.
“Work on [the] cell cycle has literally taken me 20 years to resolve,” says Dowdy, who earlier this year published a paper that he says finally answers some of his first questions about early cell-cycle progression (eLife, e02872, 2014). “During that time, I kept my career alive” by developing new technologies, publishing and patenting them, and licensing the technology.
It’s very uncommon for institutions not to claim some kind of interest in work done using university resources.—James Grimmelmann,
University of Maryland, Baltimore
Academic scientists aren’t always so savvy about their intellectual property (IP) rights, and many are uninformed about the importance of securing IP during the course of basic research. Pursuing IP on the technology that one’s lab produces can earn researchers a welcome additional ...
