Harvard University and its medical school have significant prestige in bioscience. In fact, in a 2006 report by the Milken Institute, Harvard came in first for generating the most published biotech research from 1998 to 2002. But when it comes to getting those discoveries out of the laboratory and into the marketplace-to help patients, and also to earn money for the university-Harvard has been a bit of a laggard. According to the Association of University Technology Managers, Harvard earned $21 million from licensing its IP in 2006. Not bad, but not in the top ten either; 12 other U.S. universities had more licensing revenue that year, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which pulled in more than $40 million, and the University of California system, with nearly $200 million.
"Well, that's what we're working on," says Isaac Kohlberg, chief officer of Harvard's three-year-old Office of Technology Development (OTD), a recent consolidation of Harvard's undergraduate, graduate, and medical school tech transfer operations. Since his arrival in 2005, Kohlberg has doubled the pace of Harvard's license dealmaking with the help of a new in-house transaction team, and in early 2007 the OTD established Harvard's Technology Accelerator Fund with $6 million from individual donors. The Accelerator provides funding to early-stage Harvard research projects with promising commercial value; its goal is to close a much-bemoaned "development gap" by advancing nascent technologies to a stage where they become attractive to investment by Big Pharma, biotech companies, and venture capitalists. Although the Accelerator focuses on supporting medical research, it also supports research in the applied sciences, such as engineering.
Born and raised in Israel, Kohlberg, in his mid-fifties, has worked in university technology transfer for nearly his entire career. Prior to his arrival at Harvard, he was CEO of the Tel Aviv University Economic Corporation, which serves as a technology transfer office for Tel Aviv University, Kohlberg's undergraduate alma mater, where he also received a law degree. (He earned an MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France.) For most of the 1980s, Kohlberg was CEO of the YEDA Research and Development Company, the technology transfer company for the Weizmann Institute of Science, based in Rehovot, Israel. But he is no newcomer to the United States-throughout the 1990s he held a number of positions at New York University, including vice president for industrial liaison at NYU Medical Center.
Kohlberg plans on adding another IP attorney to the OTD's ranks this summer to aid Anne Craig, who manages Harvard's IP portfolio and patent prosecution budget. Craig and the OTD's directors of business development, most of whom have a Ph.D. in the life or physical sciences, depend heavily on outside counsel, mostly from local Boston law firms, including Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, Choate Hall & Stewart, Foley, Hoag & Elliot, and Lahive & Cockfield.
The new group of three transactional lawyers works exclusively on Harvard's licensing agreements. "At the end of the day, the products of this program are strong patents and solid agreements," says Kohlberg. "A lot of tech transfer offices around the country do not have a strong legal team that works on the [licensing] agreement. But I didn't want my directors of business development to handle this-they are not the right people to draft agreements." All three transactional lawyers have experience working for pharmaceutical companies, where they might have sat on the other side of the table from academic researchers. For example, prior to joining the OTD in 2006, transactional lawyer Cris Rothfuss served for four-and-a-half years as director of IP and corporate counsel for Watertown, Massachusetts-based Control Delivery Systems, Inc., a drug delivery R&D company that was acquired in 2005.
Kohlberg says the OTD has processed roughly 30-40 licensing agreements each year for the last two years, which represents a doubling of volume since 2005. The Accelerator often provides funding specifically for proof-of-concept and validation studies, which much academic research lacks, and which for-profit drug developers increasingly require before investing. In its first year, the Accelerator received 26 applications and distributed $1.3 million to six projects. One early success: Research from the Harvard Medical School laboratories of Dr. Jose Halperin and Gerhard Wagner-both supported by money from the Accelerator-was licensed in February to Egenix, Inc., a privately held biotech company working on innovative cancer therapies and based in Millbrook, New York.
For-profit drug developers complain that universities tend to ask for more than their discoveries are worth. But, in a quest to replenish their pipelines and harness new technologies, both biotech companies and Big Pharma are looking harder than ever at early-stage research from universities. Kohlberg says it takes eight to ten years for university-licensed technology to start generating income for the school. "Results will take time," Kohlberg cautions, "but in four or five years I think we will [start to] see the fruits of our efforts. And it's not all about the money"-Harvard scientists want to see their discoveries saving lives.
Could Harvard ever top the list of academic revenue makers? Kohlberg declined to say, demurring with the comment that "there are too many assumptions and contingencies." But as drug companies know, all it takes is one blockbuster to go from middle rank to first place in record time.
