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 …

Funding Your Start-up

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Every start-up founder hopes one day for their project/technology to succeed, reach the market, and quite often improve patients’ lives. Funding is just one of the critical hurdles in the early stages. The following list will explain just a few of the many sources of investment. Bootstrapping: Sometimes the best source of funding for a small business can be its entrepreneur(s). Bootstrap financing is starting a business with minimal capital mostly provided by a person or group of people from the start-up team. This often includes dipping into savings, retirement, personal loans (including home equity), or accessing credit cards. This Read More …

Inventor Becomes Patient: My Tool Was Like a Trusted Friend Telling Me What Was Wrong

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Ernest V. Garcia, PhD, or better known as Ernie, is an endowed professor in cardiac imaging and the director of Emory’s Nuclear Cardiology R&D Laboratory. He specializes in medical imaging and bioinformatics, particularly quantitative analysis of cardiac images. Ernie has received numerous awards and honors but to highlight a few he was named a Medical Imaging Industry Top 10 Nuclear Medicine Researcher by the Medical Imaging Magazine and was named to the Council of Distinguished Investigators of the Academy of Radiology Research. What lead you to pursue cardiac imaging as part of your profession? I was trained as a scientist, Read More …

The Ever-Confusing World of Contract Lingo – Part 2

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

While much of OTT’s work deals with the review, protection, and management of the inventions made by our faculty, there is a whole other side that is of equal importance: negotiating contracts with industry, be it for licenses, clinical trials, collaborations, sponsored work, or confidential discussions. Just as the world of patents has its own set of jargon and terms, contracts do too. Below we’ve compiled a helpful list of some common terms you may encounter in contracts. You can find part 1 of this blog here. Common Contract Terms & Concepts Continued Representation: A fact that one party states Read More …

The Ever-Confusing World of Contract Lingo – Part 1

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

While much of OTT’s work deals with the review, protection, and management of the inventions made by our faculty, there is a whole other side that is of equal importance: negotiating contracts with industry, be it for licenses, clinical trials, collaborations, sponsored work, or confidential discussions. Just as the world of patents has its own set of jargon and terms, contracts do too. Below we’ve compiled a helpful list of some common terms you may encounter in contracts. What is a Contract? At its most basic, a contract is a binding legal agreement voluntarily entered into by two or more Read More …

IP Jargon: What are they talking about? – Part 2

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

When beginning the process of protecting your invention, lots of industry specific terms and legal jargon get thrown around and can seem a bit daunting. To help ease you into the world of intellectual property protection, OTT has collected and defined some of the most common words and phrases that you’re likely to come across. In this two-part post, we’ll discuss jargon heard in patent statutes and applications and during the patent review process and a patent appeal (Part 1 can be found here). In this part we will cover jargon often heard during the patent review and appeal processes. Read More …