The Office of Cooperative Research (OCR) grants licenses for the manufacture, sale and use of an invention in return for a company's funding of the patent-application process as well as royalties and/or equity. OCR has successfully negotiated more than 200 invention license agreements since it opened in 1982. In addition, Yale has earned a total of $39.8 million in royalties since 1982 from 143 U.S. and numerous foreign patents. Royalty income grew from $151,000 in 1982 to a record sum in excess of $13.5 million last year, or about 5 percent of the University's $280 million research budget. Yale has 189 patents pending.
The four new biotechnology companies formed in 1998 in partnership with Yale are:
Molecular Staging Inc., which is generating new products and improved approaches for detecting, characterizing and assessing the severity (stage) of disease. With new and powerful technologies that could surpass diagnostic tests currently being used, MSI initially will focus on cancer -- especially prostate cancer -- and deadly infectious diseases.
polyGenomics Inc., which is developing methods of analyzing population genetics to unravel the causes of diseases that involve defects in multiple genes, including hypertension-associated kidney failure and panic disorder. Their findings could be useful for treatment and for determining why some patients respond to drug therapy and others do not. The firm will be housed in laboratories belonging to the Yale pediatrics department during 1998 and will employ approximately 10 people at the outset. Next year, the company is expected to establish an alliance with a major pharmaceutical firm, double in size and move to privately owned laboratories in New Haven.
Transmolecular Sciences Inc., which currently is located at the University of Alabama at Birmingham but is planning to relocate to the New Haven area, where it initially will employ 20-30 scientists and occupy about 10,000 square feet of laboratory space. The firm is focusing on the diagnosis, imaging and treatment of malignant brain tumors called gliomas. The company also is working on edema associated with acute brain and spinal cord injury and on pain receptors in the brain associated with chronic pain.
L2 Diagnostics, which was established with investment funds from the School of Medicine as a spin-off of its Lyme/Lupus Diagnostics Lab. The firm's new diagnostic methods will be essential when Yale's Lyme disease vaccine is approved for public use. The tests will distinguish patients infected with the Lyme disease from those who have been vaccinated.
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