Tech classrooms & commerce: CU seeks to improve tech transfer.

• Author: Peterson, Eric

Turning theory into reality" is the corporate motto at Boulder's Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals Inc. Since 1992, the company has been building on the discoveries and theories of Thomas Cech, a professor of chemistry at CU-Boulder who won a 1989 Nobel Prize for his research regarding the enzyme-like properties of RNA.

Ribozyme's creation was facilitated in part by the University of Colorado's Technology Transfer Office, through which the company licensed Cech's CU-held patents in its effort to commercialize them for use in human therapeutics.

In working with CU, "We had a very satisfactory experience," said Dr. Ralph Christofferson, formerly Ribozyme's CEO and now a partner with Morgenthaler Ventures. "I view (RPI) a true success story of the system."

The problem is that success stories like Ribozyme have been too few.

When Elizabeth Hoffman came on as CU'S 20th president in fall 2000, she took a good, hard look at the recent performance of the Technology Transfer Office. The picture wasn't pretty.

In 2000, CU received $300 million in federal research funding, fourth among the country's public institutions. But, for every dollar of federal funding, CU disclosed fewer than half of the inventions of its similarly funded peers, in the process receiving half of the patents and licensing, and only a fraction of the intellectual property.

One insider labeled tech transfer at CU "an afterthought" of the '80s and '90s.

At many universities, technology transfer is big business. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation--the University of Wisconsin's counterpart to CU's Tech Transfer Office--is one of the standouts of the field, returning $30 million a year to fund research at UW-Madison. While schools such as Yale and Columbia closed around $100 million in licensing deals in the past two years, the licensing revenue reported through CU's administration was about $2.2 million in 2000. (The total is actually about twice that, due to prior licensing arrangements not reported through CU's administration.)

In response, Hoffman and CU's regents embarked on a plan to reorganize and reinvigorate tech transfer at CU. The quality or quantity of CU's research was never the issue; rather, the structure of the TTO and its surrounding culture and processes were the primary concerns.

New blood with experience in tech transfer came to the office when Jack Burns, vice president of academic affairs and research, was appointed in late 2001; and with Assistant Vice President...