Criticizing the Johns Hopkins University's technology-transfer office for its weak track record in moving school inventions to the marketplace is something of a sport in Maryland, particularly for the school's employees.
But that reputation is undeserved, said Wesley D. Blakeslee, an intellectual property attorney who's also the 34-year-old office's new head.
"Hopkins may not do the best job that Hopkins could do, but this office does a hell of a job," he said. "These people work."
During a recent two-hour interview, Blakeslee shed tears over what he called the breadth of faculty brilliance and generosity at the university. But he also expressed frustration over an autonomous academic culture that often resists riches, shuns publicity and would rather give its innovations away than charge for them.
While Hopkins is known for its research breakthroughs, including being among the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells, it's also known for extraordinary independence among its faculty and departments.
Such freedom fosters the university's scholastic endeavors. But those responsible for Hopkins' technology transfer also say it slows commercialization there.
The university spends more than any other on research, but ranks last among its peers in turning its ideas into profits.
And more schools like Hopkins hope to produce revenue from in-house research in part because federal funds are declining and university officials are looking for other financial sources.
Many researchers are unwilling to consider the business angles of their inventions, having been taught for years that money isn't the point of their work but that helping the world is. Blakeslee wants researchers to understand that the two are not mutually exclusive.
"It's a much harder job because of the politics inside of the university than I anticipated," said Blakeslee, who took on the technology-transfer challenge - after eight years as a Hopkins lawyer - in late September. He's the office's third leader in as many years.
"I thought it would take six months [to turn things around]," he said. "I'm at least a year from a normal life."
Technology transfer, as it's known, is rooted in the idea that the bright ideas springing up in the nation's laboratories and universities should make their way into the public domain as new products, procedures and cures. But to do that, the inventions often need a commercial bridge, a business of some sort that can pay for further development and eventually bring them to market.
On the whole, with a few exceptions such as Stanford University, schools are historically bad at creating these partnerships.
"A primary issue is really the culture of a university and how focused it is on this," said James L. Hughes, vice president of research and development at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.
That school earned $500,000 from 2003 through 2005 in licensing income, though it spent $1 billion in research during that time.
Academics typically aren't focused on business applications for their research. And some companies and investors shy away from much of the early-stage work coming out of universities - particularly in the medical field, where it can take a dozen plus years to commercialize an invention. That's longer than most venture capitalists are willing to wait for a return on their investment, said John S. Taylor, vice president of research at the National Venture Capital Association, based in Virginia.
The lack of commercialization means great ideas might not be put to work for the greater good. But the pressure to produce such partnerships has been ramping up lately as available federal funds decline and university officials look for other financial sources.
Some say licensing deals and spin-out companies could make up the cash difference and help support more research, which has led to intensified scrutiny of technology-transfer offices. And because of its reputation and the amount of government money it brings in, Hopkins takes the brunt of the criticism from Maryland economic development officials.
"The data ... it's not pretty," said Timothy P. Weihs, a Hopkins professor who was able to turn his invention for a heat-producing foil into a business, Reactive NanoTechnologies Inc., despite the school's culture, which he said traditionally has not prioritized moving technology forward.
The university brings in more than $1 billion a year in federal funds. It also is high on the list when it comes to filing for patents on its faculty's inventions, according to data from the Association of University Technology Managers, known as AUTM.
Yet Hopkins, with its top-tier medical school, is well below its comparable peers in reaping profit from pairing such projects with the businesses and financiers who could turn them into products, or at least income.
The university expects to earn about $9.7 million in such revenue this fiscal year and took in about $10 million last fiscal year - less than 1 percent of its annual federal research budget.
Hopkins brings in about a dollar in licensing revenue for every $189 the school spends on research. (Compare that with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is in second place behind Hopkins in terms of research expenditures, yet brings in $1 for every $79 spent.)
Though the reasons for that are varied, the blame typically falls on the shoulders of the technology-transfer office, with its revolving door of leadership. The office will need to double the current number of licensing agents to reach its potential in executing deals, Blakeslee estimates. The office currently has eight people devoted to licensing.
Blakeslee and his new boss - Aris Melissaratos, the former secretary of the state Department of Business and Economic Development who joined Hopkins in late February - say they have creative plans to improve things, but it's a proclamation that has been made before.
Every few years, after the university posted weak AUTM numbers, the administration announced a renewed effort to better cooperate with industry. New tech-transfer leaders were assigned, the office renamed and apologies for the past made.
Officials believe the latest change will yield the results they're looking for. This marks the first time a tech-transfer attorney (who has run his own law firm and used to be an engineering manager for NASA) has paired up with a one-time DBED official with a track record of bringing in the business.
Hopkins developed its first tech-transfer program in 1973, when few schools had them. Back then, the inventions conceived or created through federally funded research belonged to the government.
That changed with the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which said universities could keep inventions as long as officials disclosed their existence, filed for patents, tried to license them and shared the revenue with the creators. The idea was to stimulate the U.S. economy by tapping into academic innovation and protecting it as property, thereby giving it a competitive edge in the marketplace.
But academia and Hopkins resisted. Faculty still preferred to publish university work solely in scholarly journals and allow anyone interested to access it, Blakeslee said. Businesses, however, typically shy away from technology that isn't protected through patents.
The university published its first intellectual-property guidelines in 1986 and made several changes to its technology transfer office over the years, bringing in various leaders. But for the most part, it was activity that didn't lead to results.
"The faculty has always felt like the tech-transfer office has let them down, that it's a barrier," said Melissaratos, a Hopkins alumnus who considers stabilizing the office his primary goal. "It's better than people think it is, and we're going to prove that to the faculty and the school."
In many ways, Hopkins has been leery of technology transfer, afraid of being associated with conflict-of-interest concerns or damaging its reputation, the former DBED secretary said. Its administration has also feared that a focus on commercialization could steer faculty from their main mission: research.
"Knowledge by itself is not sufficient," Melissaratos said. "Knowledge translated into products that fix the world's problems. That's the clear path. We've got to transcend the culture, we've got to transcend the deans. At Hopkins, the deans run everything."
The technology-transfer office deals with eight Hopkins schools and their faculty members and deans, who often have varying ideas about the best way to commercialize inventions. Many of the potential products were also created through cross-disciplinary collaborations, meaning licensing plans have to be run by not just one school, but several.
"I think in principle, we're all trying to accomplish the same thing," said Nicholas P. Jones, dean of Hopkins' Whiting School of Engineering. His school is in the process of setting up its own in-house tech-transfer office to vet inventions before passing them on to Blakeslee's office.
It's an added step that Melissaratos said causes problems. Jones, however, said his staff is better equipped to gauge an idea's commercial potential as well as weigh the pros and cons of moving it forward - including whether the school can afford to spare the resources and finances that such actions require.
"We tend to use our money to fund programs and faculty, and these kinds of tech-transfer operations, they seldom make money," said Dr. Michael J. Klag, dean of Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health. "So, how much of our scarce resources do we put into it knowing that it's unlikely to recover its costs?"
While some schools have hit it big in tech-transfer deals - notably Emory University, which brought in $525 million in 2005 by selling its royalty rights to HIV drug Emtriva - such blockbusters are few and far between. Even if Hopkins doubled its licensing revenue, it would only bring in about $20 million annually - a fraction of the university's budget.
That's led to a shift in thinking. Instead of solely trying to license technology to big, cash-rich companies, the school is looking to faculty inventors in the hopes they will build their own businesses. To help with that, Hopkins brought in Steve Kubisen, a former director of technology commercialization at Utah State.
Faculty-run startup companies could use smaller grants and loans to develop their technologies to the point where bigger investors, like venture capitalists, may be interested, Kubisen said.
Hopkins has spun out five companies this fiscal year and hopes to add another three to the list before it's over. The university points to Reactive NanoTechnologies and cancer-treatment developer FASgen Inc., which was founded by four Hopkins researchers, as successful examples.
Melissaratos, special adviser to the university president for enterprise development, said he's hoping to lure Hopkins startups to a life sciences business park under construction near the school, as well as build a "virtual incubator" to nurture new companies. His other plans for technology transfer include networking various institutes, starting an entrepreneur mentorship program and helping develop Hopkins-specific venture capital funds among university-minded investors.
Julia Spicer, director of the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association, said investors are interested in university technologies, though there's a disconnect between the worlds, which she's hoping to mitigate through educational programs.
Still, most everyone involved in such work acknowledged that the one thing likely to make the biggest difference is a shift in perception. And it's coming, they say, gradually growing as a younger, more business-minded staff comes and others realize the value of commercialization.
"This is a very faculty-centric school," said Klag, the Bloomberg dean. "Changes in attitudes and beliefs only come about from the faculty themselves."
tricia.bishop@baltsun.com