iBRIDGE CONVERSATION

There will be a maintenance window involving a possible 10-30 minute iBridge Network Service outage this evening (April 26) between 7:00 pm central and 8:00 pm central to implement several enhancements to the site, specifically related to administrative roles and in preparation for further enhancements to be incorporated at a later date.

We regret any inconvenience you may encounter during this period.

Laura Paglione
Director, iBridge Network

For those interested in learning more about the iBridge Network and how it works, note below our refreshed schedule of upcoming Information Sessions.

These sessions, held via WebEx-based conference calls, each last about one hour. Laura Paglione, iBridge Network director, leads these sessions about iBridge in a fully interactive manner with all attendees.

So here is our schedule of Information Sessions for April through May 2007:

• Friday, April 27, 3:00 PM Central
• Monday, April 30, 10:00 AM Central
• Monday, May 14, 3:00 PM Central
• Thursday, May 31, 10:00 AM Central

Signing up is easy, and we welcome your participation. Just click here and select the Information Session date that works for you. Once you do this, you’ll receive a confirmation email with all of the relevant information and with easy instructions to log into the session.

Any questions, send us an email at info@iBridgeNetwork.org. We look forward to talking with you in the weeks ahead.

The Community Patent Review (CPR) Peer to Patent Project, an initiative of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School, is inviting people involved in the law and technology world to participate in an important product beta-test.

The product, developed in conjunction with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, is an online platform designed to open some patent applications for public-expert (”peer”) review. The followup aim is to help patent examiners make better (possibly faster) decisions on granting patents.

For more detailed information on the mechanics of all this, check out this Washington Post article from last March.

In regard to the beta-testing, it’s by invitation only. Send an email asap if you’re interested in participating to info@peertopatent.org. 

Once you’re accepted as a beta tester, you’ll receive a login and password to access the beta site. Beta testers will be asked to review every nook and cranny of the site. And time is tight for this stage of the project. Testing period runs through the end of this month. Launch is scheduled for June 1.

You also can pre-register to be a community patent reviewer in advance of the June 1 launch. 

One bit of worthy news out of Washington is that Congress appears ready to consider addressing the myriad problems in the U.S. patent protection regime. The Washington Post offers a solid summary of the issues and players at hand. As the Post story notes, there are lots of concerned parties involved, especially universities. Yet, the media focus, if not the hearings focus on the Hill, may lean heavily toward patent issues important to big pharma and software.  

Look for U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and U.S. Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee covering patent issues, to schedule hearings soon. The Post says bills in both chambers are due to be introduced any day.

For more background, Rep. Berman held a hearing last February on this topic titled “American Innovation at Risk: The Case for Patent Reform.”

Question for the day: how many federal dollars currently flow to U.S. colleges and universities for science and engineering research? The answer is $29 billion — up nicely from $17.5 billion in 2000, according to data from the National Science Foundation.

So you might presume the American people would want a solid ROI for all of this public investment in basic research. But how do you fairly define what this ROI is? Is it about university licensing revenues, companies formed, numbers of patents? Or is it also about ensuring a fast and fluid flow to the public of broad “knowledge diffusion” (such as networks, research tools, new equipment) along with breakthrough inventions? 

These questions, more or less, are at the heart of a new report from the Kauffman Foundation, Commercializing University Innovations: A Better Way. In a nutshell, this report argues that university innovation can be moved to the market faster if university tech transfer offices shift their program emphases from licensing/revenue to a “volume model” (based on quantity of innovations moved out the door).

The report offers four ways (or perhaps some combination thereof) this dynamic could happen: free agency among faculty, regional alliances among schools, Internet-based approaches (such as iBridge Network), and faculty loyalty (e.g., giving back via donations to the institution). 

Along this line, The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) offers balanced coverage of the report, including some substantive feedback from officials at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison and WARF, as is well known in research and commercialization circles, together continue to be national leaders in developing innovation.

On this front, here’s an interesting piece of personnel news related to Wisconsin and WARF: John Gee, former founder and director of the NASA Ames Technology Commercialization Center, has been named president and CEO of the Information Technology Association of Wisconsin. Gee’s career experience – which along with NASA Ames includes stints as a tech-focused entrepreneur – certainly ought to fit well in helping WARF further accelerate its research-commercialization program.

Just to round out our coverage of the Nano Nexus 2007 conference at TN’s Oak Ridge National Lab, here’s the update on the graduate student business competition — the Nano I2P Competition. The team of graduate students from the University of Texas have won the $25,000 first prize for their early-stage commercialization plan of their technology called NANOTaxi. (Photo: Abiola Ajetunmobi, co-inventor Cristal Glangchai, Jakub Felkl, ORNL Director Jeff Wadsworth, and Nicolas Rojeski.)

NANOTaxi is a nano-based drug delivery system that is designed to take a specific payload to any part of the body. NANOTaxi, which has its patent pending, initially will target cancer treatments, particularly lung cancer, which has the lowest survival rates among all cancer afflictions.

The nano aspect of this is almost alarmingly simple. The technology essentially acts like a taxi in bringing, say, a cancer treatment straight to diseased cells in the body. The nano device is injected into the body via the bloodstream, heads to the trouble spot, and then releases its payload.

The team says its next steps are to seek federal grant or angel funding to help fuel further product development. In the near term, they aim to round out its core team by adding an expert in the FDA approval process. Later they’ll hire a CEO who can take the company passed its in vivo clinical trial stages into full commercialization. NANOTaxi is a student-faculty collaboration project within the University of Texas. 

There’s no doubt the people at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) understand the importance of its research to the marketplace. Jeffrey Wadsworth, the outgoing director of ORNL, honed in on this point in his keynote remarks at the Nano Nexus 2007 conference taking place April 2-4 at ORNL. (Photo: Manu Bhardwaj, iBridge Network Team, and Jeremy Stipkala, at Nano Nexus.)

Wadsworth, who’s ending a four-year term here to take an executive position with Battelle, focused on the lab’s integrated research in nano, bio, and supercomputing. And he emphasized how he and his team are adamant about working to move ORNL’s advances into industry and among entrepreneurs. Over the last five years, ORNL has spun out 74 companies. In addition, roughly $80 million in venture funding has been invested in technology companies in the Oak Ridge/Knoxville region.

The centerpiece of all of this activity is the lab’s work in nano. As a result of the federal government’s commitment over the last several years to fuel research in nano, ORNL has become one of the leading centers for research in this space. And it recently opened its Center for Nanophase Materials Science, which operates as a so-called “national user facility.” That is, the center allows researchers from all over to apply to be selected as users of the facility.

Meanwhile, here at Nano Nexus 2007, fifteen universities are competing today in a graduate student business competition focused on nanotechnology. The six finalists were just announced an hour ago, and they are: Vanderbilt, two teams from Georgia Tech, Louisiana Tech, University of Texas, and Florida State. The overall winner, which pockets a $25,000 prize, will be announced this afternoon.