STTR/SBIR Proposal Assistance Resources

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

In the world of startup funding, resources and donors abound. Securing a piece of this abundance, however, is quite a tricky prospect. Two such funding programs, the STTR (Small Business Technology Transfer Research) and SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research), are operated by the U.S. government agencies such as NIH, DOD and others. These initiatives allot federal research money to small businesses with the intent of funding scientific research directed towards commercialization efforts. This article will dive deeper into the STTR/SBIR application process, highlighting various resources available to researchers who wish to utilize such funding in their own startup efforts. A Read More …

The OTT POC Fund: A Little Goes a Long Way

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

What’s one of the biggest hurdles to startup success? Finding enough money to start. Seed funding is absolutely critical to getting new technologies on the market. It’s the money that can help give an idea a physical shape, put it on the path to becoming a full-fledged product. The POC fund is a simple idea reflected in its simple acronym: proof of concept. The fund is meant to give Emory inventors enough money to develop their product with as little bureaucratic stalling as possible. By getting funds into the hands of innovators quickly and effectively, and by helping provide follow-up Read More …

From the Director: IP Policy Q&A

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Many people are unaware, but most universities, including Emory, have formal intellectual property (IP) policies. At first glance it might seem counterintuitive to the university mission of creating and sharing knowledge, but the policies are written in a way that both encourage scholarly activity and the open exchange of ideas while balancing the potential to commercialize new inventions. What these polices say is that if one happens to make an invention that could end up as a new product then the institution owns the invention – but in return, as part of the deal, the institution fronts various costs associated Read More …

Crowdfunding Your Start-up? Be Wary.

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Crowdfunding has been all the rage for years now. Take Ouya or the Pebble Watch, for example, which raised millions of dollars within a matter of weeks. The product-based platforms of Kickstarter or IndieGoGo aren’t even the only ones out there—equity crowdfunding is also becoming a popular method of raising funds among newer startups, even those that already have Series A funding. But it’s important to know crowdfunding isn’t without its drawbacks. Start-ups, especially less established ones, need to be careful before turning to the world wide web for what seems like free money. It isn’t. Money off the Top Read More …

Evolution of an Epidemic: Taming a Killer Virus

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

AIDS—acquired immunity deficiency syndrome—was named in 1982, at the beginning of the epidemic in the U.S. It was another two years before it was known that human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was the cause of this strange new disease. Death rates rose steadily and steeply over the next decade. By the mid-1990s, AIDS was the leading cause of death for Americans ages 25 to 44 and more than 250,000 people had died from AIDS or AIDS-related causes. “Some of our most creative people were taken away from us by this terrible disease,” says Emory synthetic chemist Dennis Liotta. “I became increasingly Read More …

Marianne Swanson: The Survivor

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Marianne Swanson, a senior staff nurse at Grady Health System’s Ponce Center, was born and raised in Brooklyn, in a close-knit Italian-American family and community. She lost her first husband and two of her three children to AIDS, and she is HIV positive. This is her story: Starting a family: Jeff and I were in a singing group in a Catholic Church, that was where we met. We fell in love and got married in a small Christian church in Brooklyn. We were married for about two years before I got pregnant with our first son, Jonathan. My second son Read More …

Nina Martinez: The HIV Positive Twin

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Public health analyst Nina Martinez is 35 years old and has been living with HIV for all but six weeks of her life. Her father was active duty Navy, and she’s a twin. She has HIV while her twin does not. This is her story: How it happened: My twin and I were born 12 weeks early and at that time in the mid-1980s you needed to take a lot of lab work. Because they took labs so often, we were both anemic. We required blood transfusions at 6 weeks old. I was transported to San Francisco and she remained Read More …

Dennis Liotta: The Chemist

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Synthetic chemist Dennis Liotta, PhD, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor at Emory and executive director of the Emory Institute for Drug Development, is the co-developer of an antiretroviral drug that has saved the lives of countless people living with HIV around the world. Starting out: Liotta says he was “genetically coded to be a chemist.” Not only was he naturally drawn to the field, he was able to follow the footsteps of his oldest brother, an organic chemist at Georgia Tech. “Charles was my first scientific role model,” Liotta says. “He is one of the most gifted teachers I’ve ever seen. Read More …

Raymond Schinazi: The Virologist

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Organic medicinal chemist and virologist Raymond Schinazi, PhD, the Frances Winship Walters Professor of Pediatrics at Emory and director of the Laboratory of Biochemical Pharmacology, was born in Egypt to Italian parents. In 1962 his family was threatened by the Nasser regime and immigrated to Naples as refugees. He went to boarding school in the UK, where he was a chemistry major at Bath University, and later came to the U.S. and studied pharmacology at Yale University before beginning his career at Emory. The path to chemist: I was actually pretty good at chemistry. I wanted to by a physicist, but Read More …

George Painter: The Corporate Partner

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

George Painter, PhD, is the chief executive officer of DRIVE, a not-for-profit company wholly owned by Emory University but with the independence to run like a biotechnology company. He recalls his career and its intersection with the innovations in Dennis Liotta’s lab, where critical HIV antiretroviral drugs were created. Meeting Dennis Liotta: Dennis came to Emory in 1976. I was a senior graduate student, and he was a young assistant professor, so he was here (at Emory) all hours of the day and night as was I, so we became acquainted. But really, the reason I kept coming and going from Read More …

Jeff Lennox: The HIV Physician

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Jeff Lennox, MD, is an Emory professor of medicine, Emory chief of internal medicine at Grady Memorial Hospital and the former medical director of the infectious disease program at the Ponce de Leon Center. “At Grady, we see patients from every continent except Antarctica, so we take care of patients with a wide variety of infectious diseases,” he says.” In addition, Grady has one of the largest populations of HIV-infected patients in the United States.” Here, Lennox tells how he came to specialize in infectious disease and HIV.  A new disease: As a medical student, I was fascinated with bacteria Read More …

Monte Eaves: A Kauffman Success Story

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Monte Eaves is a professor of surgery at Emory University and Medical Director at Emory Aesthetic Center. He is also the man behind EMRGE, a company developing products that are revolutionizing the wound closure industry. EMRGE challenges the traditional needle and thread wound closure procedure with noninvasive and cost-effective technology that promotes healing and minimizes scarring. For this, Eaves was recently awarded the Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) award for 2017 Startup of The Year, one of many achievements. Shortly after, we got to talk with him about how he got there and the role OTT and Emory’s Kauffman Foundation Read More …

Venture Funding, Tranches, What?

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Every start-up wants to become the next verb. “She definitely Photoshopped that image.” “Do you think we can Uber home from here?” “Here, let me Google that for you.” But before any of those companies ever had their names added to the Oxford English Dictionary, they were lean units, not even a fraction of the size they are today. Those small groups of entrepreneurs got to realize their dream through accumulating funding — at first, coming from the pockets of their family and friends, but eventually from dedicated venture capitalists. The list below will detail each formalized round of start-up Read More …

The Ins and Outs of Creative Commons Manuscript Submissions

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

It’s fairly easy to prove ownership of a newly purchased jacket: simply pull out your receipt. But what about a story you wrote, or an invention you designed? What if someone takes your original plan and modifies it? What if a rival claims you stole their idea? The question of ownership only amplifies in importance as technology and progress gains more speed than ever before. In the field of research, this question is critical: what is the point in investing in and developing a technology that the competition can copy as soon as you share it? Copyrights, trademarks, patents, and Read More …

Holiday Patents—Really?

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

It’s the holiday season and what better way to poke a little fun at an important part of our profession—patents. Here are five of our favorite interesting, unique but certainly creative. Here are some of our favorites. Feel free to tweet at us (@EmoryOTT) with some of yours. 1. “Underwater Christmas Tree”. US4130161A Abstract: An underwater Christmas tree for controlling flow from an offshore well is disclosed as having a master valve which is controlled by fluid pressure within a flow-line extending from a production bore of the tree, and means for receiving and releasably retaining a TFL tool in the Read More …

What Does Mixing Math, Physics, Computers, and Imagination Give You? A Pioneer in Radiation Oncology.

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Ian R. Crocker, MD, FACR, is a radiation oncologist specializing in brain and eye tumors, who worked at Winship Cancer Institute for over 30 years. Throughout his career, Crocker was an active member of multiple innovation and research teams that sought to develop new medical technologies and methods to improve treatment outcomes and patient care. Some of his most notable successes include his co-invention of the BetaCath system to prevent the re-narrowing of arteries after an angioplasty and his involvement in the Emory start-up, Velocity Medical Solutions, which produced new, widely used imaging software to improve cancer treatment. Now retired Read More …

What is an IPO?

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg opened his private company to the public. In the company’s initial public offering (IPO), $16 billion of stock were bought as investors sought to value the technology giant, vying for a share of its profits. Along with the selling of stock, Facebook’s management underwent a deep restructuring process. Most people recognize an IPO as a company’s first introduction to the stock market, but what exactly is it? Most simply by Investopedia, an initial public offering is “the first sale of stock by a company to the public.” Before an IPO, equity is distributed among private investors Read More …

Lessons from Baseball: Applying Passion and Competitive Drive to Radiation Oncology

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Tim Fox worked at Emory University as an Associate Professor & Director of Medical Physics from 1994 to 2014. In 2005 he and three of his Emory colleagues created the Emory start-up, Velocity Medical Solutions, which built and sold a multimodal medical imaging software. Velocity was later acquired by Varian Medical Systems and in 2014, Fox left Emory to accept a full-time position as the Associate Vice President of Imaging Informatics at Varian. Fox grew up playing baseball and now applies that same passion and drive to his entrepreneurial endeavors Just like the famous line from the baseball movie, Field Read More …

Treating Anxiety Disorders: Balancing the Real World and the Virtual World

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Barbara Olasov Rothbaum, PhD, is the Associate Vice Chair of Clinical Research in Emory School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, and director of Emory’s Veterans Program and Emory’s Trauma & Anxiety Recovery Program. Dr. Rothbaum specializes in treatment of anxiety disorders, with a focus on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). With over 200 scientific publications, Rothbaum has changed the field of PTSD and was a forerunner in the use of virtual reality in treatment of anxiety disorders. What initially drew you to the field of psychiatry? I went to UNC-Chapel Hill Read More …

SBIR & STTR Funding for Your Start-up

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Entrepreneurs and small business owners at Emory who are looking for an alternate source of income can tap into Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funds administered by the federal government. In association with some of its largest and most influential agencies, the U.S. government is looking to support innovation and growth by funding the newly seeded businesses involved in research and development. The SBIR program was founded in 1977 when two men, Roland Tibbetts and Senator Edward Kennedy, recognized the importance of small business growth in the economy. Birthed out of the National Science Foundation (NSF), success in the first Read More …