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Published online 11 June 2008 | Nature 453, 830-831 (2008) | doi:10.1038/453830a
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The winding road from ideas to income
Huge numbers of offices have been established over the past 30 years to help university researchers take their discoveries from the lab to the clinic. Meredith Wadman assesses their success.
It looks as though Phillip Robinson may achieve something most researchers don't dare to dream of — seeing his past decades' bench slog translate into a commercially available drug to treat conditions such as epilepsy. It's early days, but companies are already contacting the neurobiologist, declaring their interest in taking his products into the clinic.
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Since I've been quoted in the above article and my comments seem to have upset some colleagues in the local TTO I thought I'd put them in the context of how they were presented to the author of this article. The comments are mine and don't necessarily reflect those of my University and it is also worth noting that I pointed out to the journalist that I had worked with a series of TTOs including the NRDC (National Research and Developement Corporation now BTG plc), MRC Technology and also Cambridge University. The use of plural in my quotes is thus deliberate. My views on IPR and tech transfer are also expanded on my University website at http://www.path.cam.ac.uk/~mrc7/ So here is what I said in context. My experience of University Tech Transfer is somewhat middling. Expectations of university's about their TTOs are too high. When Cambridge University was sold the idea of owning all its academics patentable IP I think most people who voted for it thought that this would mean the University took a share of the profits and would do well. In fact what the situation really is is that they also buy into a share of the losses. Thus managing an ever expanding portfolio, only a fraction of which brings in any significant income, usually turns into a loss making enterprise. My personal opinion is that we did better when we off-loaded the risks on to third parties outside of the University (which could be easily achieved when academics owned their IP and could take them directly to VCs and angels etc) and trusted that a significant proportion of academics who then made a success of their ideas gave money back to the University. The upside may be slightly smaller, but the downside and risks to the University are also smaller. TTOs struggle to compete on the open market for the best staff, since most people who are any good are going to get better offers from industry or end up for a top VC firm. At the same time they do tend to offer higher salaries than academics get so there is often some resentment at the pay differential. There are a small number of very good people who stay in University TTOs because of their ideologies rather than for the money and rewards. I've had several successes in my career, the biggest so far being CAMPATH (alemtuzumab) with Genzyme, but more recently TRX4 (otelixizumab) from TolerRx is looking promising having just been granted approval by the FDA for entry into Phase III trials. However I think the success of these products has been despite TTOs and mainly because of the dogged determination of a large group of scientists who kept on plugging forwards when things looked difficult both scientifically and business wise. That's about it really. We are where we are, it's a system I have to work with, but it's not my idea of the best system. Mike Clark