Todd Sherer, PhD, is the Associate VP for Research and Executive Director of the Emory University Office of Technology Transfer.
Happy New Year, and I hope 2025 brings you joy, happiness, and prosperity. This year marks the 40th anniversary of Emory’s Office of Technology Transfer (OTT), so I’m reflecting on what the world looked like four decades ago.
In 1985, Back to the Future was released, and who knew the kind of cultural phenomenon it would become? Michael Jordan was also named NBA’s Rookie of the Year in 1985 (but I think we all knew then that he was something special). Personally, I’d just finished my undergraduate degree at Oregon State University and had begun my research career at the Arid Lands Ecology Reserve, Hanford site, in Washington.
And at the same time, all the way across the country in Atlanta, OTT was founded – and don’t we look great for 40?
A transformation of tech transfer
As the years have passed, we’ve grown a lot. At our start, we were just a division of the Office of Sponsored Programs. We didn’t have a dedicated staff member until 1992, and it wasn’t until five years later that we became an independent office. Our essential duties were filing patents, marketing technologies, and negotiating agreements.
Now, 40 years later, Emory OTT has 24 full-time employees, plus a sizeable roster of interns and students. We’ve created new teams, moved offices four times, and expanded our offerings to better serve Emory’s faculty. We’ve become value creators: Every day, week, and month that we work on a technology, we strive to increase its value through reducing risk and increasing potential viability.
Technology transfer has become an expected part of academic culture – especially at eminent research institutions like Emory. Forty years ago, had you called a meeting with the university’s innovation ecosystem, OTT would have been the only office present. (Or, maybe just as likely, people would have asked, “What’s an innovation ecosystem?”) Happily, this is no longer the case. Now, OTT partners with at least eight other offices across the university to make research commercialization happen.
The fruits of 40 years of excellence
It’s through dedicated collaboration and teamwork that we’ve been able to achieve our success. Recent wins include Emory being named the third top contributor of FDA-approved drugs and vaccines in the world among public institutions (only behind the NIH and the entire University of California system) and OTT bringing in nearly $1.4 billion in cumulative licensing revenue since FY1992. We have a robust product pipeline and have helped to bring more than 60 products to market with many more in development. We support programs to assist Emory’s entrepreneurial faculty in launching and scaling their start-ups. All these activities – and more – allow us to complete the cycle of investing in research that becomes solutions to transform people’s lives.
We hope you will join us throughout the year as we celebrate 40 years of Emory innovation by highlighting ground-breaking research that has come through our office and how it has positively impacted lives. As we celebrate throughout 2025, you can expect exciting new content – like videos, interactive webpages, and more – featuring familiar faces and old friends of the office. And be sure to join us at this year’s Annual Celebration of Technology and Innovation to mark the occasion in-person. Finally, follow Emory Technology Transfer on LinkedIn to stay up to date with all things OTT40.
Here’s to 40 years of past success, and here’s to looking toward 40 more.