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University of Chicago Prepares Pipeline for Selling Academics' Discoveries

By Sam Cholke | August 26, 2014 8:25am
 Crews are working to meet an October deadline for the opening of the Chicago Innovation Exchange.
Chicago Innovation Exchange
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HYDE PARK — The University of Chicago is putting the finishing touches on a new pipeline to take professors’ ideas to market as well as to the academic journals.

“Getting government funding to do that basic research is getting harder,” said John Flavin, the executive director of the university’s Chicago Innovation Exchange. “Commercialization is becoming a more attractive option to bring these ideas to the world.”

The home of the new business incubator will open in October on the second floor of the Harper Theater, 5328 S. Harper Ave., with a prototyping lab opening next year across 53rd Street.

Flavin, an entrepreneur himself with 20 years of experience in life science ventures, was brought in last October to envision how the university could better help faculty and students turn good ideas into solid businesses.

On Monday, Flavin walked through the nearly realized vision in the converted theater. Crews were still screwing down floor tiles that hid a maze of cables that will feed desks for 130 in the main co-working space. Empty sockets stood ready for video conferencing equipment in eight conference rooms. Raw planks outlined where a coffee bar will soon be surrounded by couches.

In a little more than two months, the space will be filled with students and faculty from the university who think their research should go to market as well as a seminar.

Flavin said he thought taking a discovery to market was becoming an increasingly attractive option for academics who wanted to keep an idea alive in an environment of dwindling federal research funding. According to Flavin, research universities better connected to the venture capital world have already caught on to this new reality.

“At places like MIT, you ask if you can patent before you ask if you can publish,” Flavin said.

He said the academic climate was increasingly asking researchers to protect the potential profits of a discovery before putting the idea out there for all to see in an academic journal.

Faculty research can also be a healthy revenue stream for research universities fighting to fund professorships.

Chemistry professor Richard Silverman’s development of the pain medication Lyrica in 2007 netted Northwestern University $770 million in royalties, and he later donated a portion of his own profits from the drug to fund a new science building on the Evanston campus.

The University of Chicago notoriously gave away for free its own research on one of the biggest blockbuster drugs of all time.

In 1977, biochemist Eugene Goldwasser made groundbreaking discoveries in the function of the liver that dramatically changed how dialysis and anemic patients are treated.

Goldwasser was never able to persuade the university to patent the discovery, which went on to become a $40 billion business for the Amgen company and is now considered the beginning of the modern biotech industry.

“What’s on the shelf here today?” Flavin asked.

He said the push to commercialize discoveries is not new at the University of Chicago or any university, but the Chicago Innovation Exchange centralizes the effort in one place on campus.

“It’s providing a new organized gateway to the market,” Flavin said.

He said that if the project was successful, faculty would have new ways to get their ideas to people who would benefit the most from them, provide more options for industrious doctoral students facing a shrinking academic job market and attract more businesses to Hyde Park that hope to feed off the talent at the university.

The Chicago Innovation Exchange has already started vetting ideas and providing training for would-be entrepreneurs and will start providing start-up capital from a $20 million fund as it moves into the new space.

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