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UB STEPPING INTO ROLE AS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ENGINE
Published on January 26, 2003
Author: STEPHEN WATSON - News Staff Reporter
© The Buffalo News Inc.
Colleges can be insular places, isolated from the cares and concerns of the wider world, and the University at Buffalo is no exception.
Its main campus is located miles from the heart of Buffalo's downtown business sector, on 1,200 acres of former Amherst swampland ringed by a state highway. But UB is working to become a bigger player in the Western New York economy, spurring hopes that new science and technology developed at the university can generate jobs here. "Over the past few years, we've put increasing emphasis on making sure our intellectual property is protected and commercialized," said UB Provost Elizabeth D. Capaldi. UB's Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, where supercomputers are used to crunch genetic data in an effort to create new medical drugs, has received a lot of attention. However, the university's efforts go beyond bioinformatics, to a new, broader emphasis on commercializing faculty research -- taking ideas from the laboratory to the factory. In 2003, the school plans to boost the number of patents it applies for, increase the number of its inventions that are licensed to business and help to start up more new companies, said Robert J. Genco, a vice provost and head of the university's Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach. The efforts are part of "a cultural shift, a shift to entrepreneurship" at the university, he said. A report conducted by UB and released in March found the school has an annual $1.25 billion effect on the local economy. Capaldi notes that each $1 of research money provides $3 in economic impact for the region, including money spent on support staff and new equipment. Each $1 million of research and development spending generates 29 jobs, the report found. Last year was a big year for UB's bioinformatics center, with the hiring of Jeffrey Skolnick as its director. Work at the bioinformatics center has begun, with Skolnick submitting for publication two scientific papers based on just his first three weeks of research there. But any pharmaceutical advances likely are years away. For now, the university is focusing on boosting the number of patent applications and licensing arrangements based on the work of its researchers. UB faculty disclosed 49 new technologies -- the first step in the process -- in 2001, and the figure rose sharply to 80 disclosed inventions in 2002, Genco said. Also in 2002, UB faculty received 16 patents in the life and physical sciences, and applied for 25 new patents, he said. University research spawned three start-up companies last year, and two existing companies acquired licenses to commercially use UB research, Genco said. University officials want to speed up the process of reviewing new technologies -- from six to three months -- as part of an effort to provide more support, more quickly, to the best research, Genco said. "We have streamlined the evaluation process for inventions, and the patenting process." UB wants to clear up a backlog of pending patent applications, Capaldi added, and increase the number of licenses its research generates. To that end, the university has hired Keith O. Ellis, a former Procter & Gamble executive, as director of its Intellectual Property Division, part of the technology transfer office. "He has the job of educating faculty about the value of their ideas," Capaldi said. The university has set up a modest fund that will be used to help support very early product development of promising faculty research, Genco said. UB officials are looking to expand the school's incubator for start-up businesses, located in a 40,000-square-foot building at the 20-acre Baird Research Park on Sweet Home Road. The school could build two or three more similar-size incubator buildings there, or build at the South Campus or the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus downtown, Genco said. The university is working to make its technology transfer office and incubator full-service, offering its faculty advice on financial planning, how to run a business, marketing and legal services. While some research can be spun off into a start-up company, some faculty innovations are best licensed to a larger, existing company, Genco said. In that case the university hopes to interest the company in opening a division in the Buffalo area to manufacture the licensed goods. In fact, UB officials are in discussions with three companies that want to set up local high-tech manufacturing operations involving biopharmaceuticals and biologic tissue engineering, Genco said. The companies aren't manufacturing licensed UB products, but are attracted to working with UB faculty and the area's qualified workers, he said. "That's the kind of manufacturing we can do here," Genco said. e-mail: swatson@buffnews.comSHARON CANTILLION/Buffalo News
Russ Miller, director of the Center for Computational Research at the
University at Buffalo, with the new tiled display wall that displays
information at 20 times the resolution of conventional large-format
display screens. The display is 88 square feet.
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