Universities everywhere are getting more aggressive in marketing the products of faculty minds. Tasting early success, FSU is no exception.

The breakthrough came last November, when Florida State biologists Dr. Kurt Hofer and Dr. Li-Xi Yang finally cracked a cancer research problem that had stumped them for a decade.

The work focused on non-oxygenated cancer cells, which are much more resistant to radiation therapy than cancer cells containing oxygen. Generally speaking, a radiation dose high enough to kill these tumor cells is a dose high enough to cause serious damage to the patient's normal body tissues. Hofer and Yang's initial attempts at oxygenating these cells using an antibiotic called Flagyl proved toxic to the lab mice on which it was tested.

But late last year, Hofer (Ph.D. University of Vienna) and Yang (Ph.D. Dartmouth) found that when they combined four molecules of Flagyl on a linker molecule, they could create an oxygenating agent (called a radiosensitizer) that is 50 to 200 times more potent, yet much less toxic, than Flagyl itself.

"With this discovery, the formerly incurable portion of the tumor becomes the easier to cure," said Hofer, a Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Biology at FSU.

Since non-oxygenated (hypoxic) cells make up anywhere from 3 to 50 percent of all tumors, in theory the discovery could revolutionize cancer radiation therapy. The idea, then, would seem to be to make it available to cancer patients, posthaste. But for all its promise, it could easily take another decade before this exciting FSU-developed discovery ever has a chance to be tried in a clinic.

Welcome to the Byzantine world of campus-based research and development, where inventions may be light years ahead of industry but are obliged to crawl through the patenting, licensing, testing and marketing pipelines at a snail's pace before the consumer ever gets a crack at them. Hofer and Yang's research has paid off, but the task of getting the discovery into the hands of a pharmaceutical company and on to cancer patients is a labyrinthine research and administrative process that's just begun.

The university filed for a patent this past April on behalf of Hofer and Yang, then settled in to wait the two years that patent approval can easily take. Not that the inventors will be resting during this period. Their discovery has entered the pre-clinical evaluation stage, which means roughly two years of animal research before the drug can be tested on human cancer patients.

As this article goes to press, Hofer is at work on a stack of grant proposals to obtain funds for this further investigation. It's the part of his job that's getting increasingly harder to do.

"Today, on average, only about eight percent of all (federal grant) proposals are being funded," he said. "That means it is necessary to produce nearly perfect proposals even to be considered for that small chance."

But somebody has to foot the research bills. A 1991 study in Science magazine put the average cost for bringing a new drug to the marketplace at about $240 million. Hofer jokes about lab mice starting at $9 apiece plus shipping, room and board, but he and other scientists nationwide typically have to balance laboratory work and the search for the cash to pay for it.

"I hardly see my lab anymore now," he says wryly. "I'm a slave to my computer, writing, writing, writing."

FSU faculty have help at hand for this kind of work. Since 1989, the university's Office of Technology Transfer has been available to step in and help faculty members and the university bring inventions from the laboratory to the marketplace. Housed at Innovation Park, the unit is part of the Office of Research, directed by Vice President for Research Dr. Robert M. Johnson. Dr. Michael Devine (Ph.D. Texas), associate vice president for research, runs the office and serves on the FSU Patenting and Licensing committee. Devine will help Hofer and Yang through the initial patent process and will see their invention through until it hits the drugstore shelf.

Universities typically own the rights to their faculty's inventions or discoveries. In recent years, schools nationwide have taken a more aggressive role in seeking out these home-grown inventions and making them commercially available. FSU is no exception--the tech-transfer office is an outgrowth of a patenting process in place at the university for many years.

It's important to think of university research in context. Academic institutions don't typically make up the lion's share of the country's research and development. In 1989, universities accounted for a mere $12 billion in nationally spent R&D dollars, while industry conducted about $96 billion out of a total of $131 billion. But university-based technology transfer is clearly on the rise. An October 1994 Association of University Technology Managers' report showed that 117 universities earned $242 million in royalties during FY 1993, a 40 percent jump from Ô92.

And in such high-tech industries as biotechnology, universities do more than hold their own against private enterprise. Fact is, they are major players, acccounting for more than half of all research funded by biotechnology corporations. University/industry research relationships produce more than four times as many patent applications per research dollar than non-university based research, according to a 1986 study published in Science.

Transferring technology from a university setting to the marketplace is complicated for a number of reasons, Devine says. First, the whole idea represents a blending of the academic and business worlds--a departure from the way university researchers usually operate. Traditionally, they've published accounts of their discoveries in academic journals for all the world to see.

But when it comes to ideas that could be commercially valuable--like Hofer's radiosensitizing agents--the old rules don't apply. Generally once an idea is published, the author--and the university--have only 12 months to begin the patent process, or they can kiss their rights goodbye. In the case of foreign patents, there's even less time. These days if an FSU researcher has an idea or invention that even smells marketable, it's best to keep mum, at least for awhile, until the researcher and the university's patent lawyer have had a chance to investigate its commercial possibilities.

"It's been a big policy change," Devine said. "Faculty are now encouraged to participate in these activities. Nowadays you can't just publish it and leave it for someone else to pick it up and run with it."

Secondly, the idea of university-developed inventions in the marketplace begs the question of just what academic research is designed to accomplish. Groundbreaking discoveries of the marketable kind are usually a by-product--rather than a goal--of universities, whose aim has typically been to train students and to add to the accumulated knowledge in specific scientific disciplines. Most universities arrive at commercial products only indirectly. That said, it helps to bear in mind that computers, radio and television, and biotechnology were born of the same university-bred beginnings. But for most research faculty, making marketable products just isn't a priority.

However--and perhaps as a sign of the times--that way of thinking is changing. Tightened federal funding for research has all but forced university researchers to look beyond the government to make inroads in their disciplines, Devine says. And administrators at colleges across the country realized that some major inventions simply weren't being developed the way they could be.

A genetic test for breast and colon cancers developed in 1993 by the Hereditary Cancer Institute at Creighton University in Nebraska might well have been put on a shelf if not for that university's aggressive licensing, patenting and marketing efforts. The move mirrors a push by virtually all the nation's research universities toward the concept of technology transfer, which schools nationwide began to cultivate in earnest during the 1980s. That's when passage of the Bayh-Dole Act gave universities the clear right to own inventions created with federal research dollars for the first time, and effectively opened the door for academic inventions.

In step with the trend when it opened six years ago, FSU's Office of Technology Transfer has pulled into the forefront of the initiative. Thus far FSU has seen $12.5 million dollars in licensing income from chemistry professor Dr. Robert Holton's synthesis of the anti-cancer compound taxol, a stunning example both of the worthiness of tech-transfer efforts and the often maddeningly long time it takes to bring them to fruition.

A derivative of bark from the Pacific yew tree, taxol was discovered in the 1960s. In 1979, the compound was found to be effective at treating certain cancers. Four years of lab tests followed before the first tests on humans in 1983. The results were so promising that by 1985, a frenzied race was on to find more Pacific yews to process for the scarce drug, and Holton was at work synthesizing the rare chemical in the laboratory. By 1989 he had succeeded in making one part of the complicated taxol molecule in the lab, and the university entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with Bristol-Myers Squibb by 1990. He and his team, working nearly around the clock, cracked the code for total synthesis in 1994, nearly a decade later.

Hofer and Yang's find has joined more than 76 other FSU inventions or discoveries currently in the patent and licensing queue on campus. Florida State would seem to be firmly in step with a growing national trend to successfully patent university-bred inventions--data from the Southern Technology Council reported a 63 percent increase in patents awarded to four-year colleges between 1992-94. With taxol to put it on the map, FSU expects to join the ranks of the top 10 universities in licensing income when fiscal year 1994 figures are released (see chart).

Vice President Johnson says FSU has been fortunate to have had the cash available--often several thousand dollars per invention for patent applications alone--to have gotten campus creations started on the road to market.

"We've gotten the faculty aware of this area and interested in it and we've gotten patents filed and issued," he says. "What we have to do now is work harder and smarter to get these inventions licensed. That's the whole point."

One problem FSU encounters in marketing its own inventions is that the technologies involved are often so far ahead of the marketplace that companies that might acquire the rights to them don't exist yet. And most of these inventions are still relatively premature when they cross Devine's desk; often the work of making a prototype has to wait for more funding. Deciding at this early stage whether an idea can be successfully marketed with the least out-of-pocket expense usually requires a lot of quick thinking--and some gambling.

"You have to go out and find industrial collaborators early," says Devine. "The challenge is that it's hard to find that until you have those further research results. Companies sometimes don't want to invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in research and development. The problem then is, who's going to develop all this technology?"

Aside from this murky issue, a big part of the job is promoting the idea as well as carrying out the day-to-day duties of university/industry partnerships. FSU has recently joined forces with a newly formed group of university, government and business representatives aiming to "incubate" technology-oriented and innovation-based commercial enterprises.

The Florida North Shore Technology Centers, Inc., a private, nonprofit northwest Florida-based group supported by funds from the state's Enterprise Florida program, FSU, local businesses and government, plans to provide business assistance, start-up capital, office space and other critical assistance to those fledgling corporations that someday might grow up to be licensees for FSU inventions. This technology/business breeding ground also hopes to eventually provide a number of high-tech jobs to the area, Devine says.

Of course, when you're looking at the driving force behind getting inventions to the marketplace, the best source typically is the inventor.

"Inventors can overcome all the negativism and skepticism to get their invention on the market," Devine says. "It's often intellectually challenging for many faculty to get involved with this; it invigorates their research and teaching.

"Plus there's the potential for the university to get some return on the money that it invests in research. It's a way to demonstrate to society in concrete terms that university research is relevant to everyday life."