Tag: ORA

Blog posts to be included in the ORA Newsletter blog site

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 …

IdeaGate: Submit Your Disclosures On-line

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Technology Transfer Offices receive invention disclosure forms for new innovations daily. These forms are the way that Emory personnel let the Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) know about their innovative ideas, so that OTT can explore the commercial potential of their idea or invention. Emory’s OTT continuously has an influx of these, as the faculty and researchers on campus are always creating new innovations. Faculty submitted over 250 invention disclosures last year. Once OTT receives the forms, they research whether the idea is protectable, if the idea has already been protected, what the market around the idea looks like, or 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 …

What is HIPAA?

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Losing your job is hard enough. But what if you lost your healthcare insurance along with it? And there were no standardized ways to keep or transfer your health information? Although this scenario may seem hard to fathom today, in the not-so-distant past the loss of employer-based health insurance and irregular recordkeeping were very real fears. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was passed in 1996 to address many concerns around health records and coverage. There are five sections (“titles”) to the act: Title I: HIPAA Health Insurance Reform | Health care access, portability and renewability Title I Read More …

The Benefit of Master Agreements

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Master agreements help set standard terms between two parties of a contractual, reciprocal agreement. The process of two parties having to repeatedly enter into a separate agreement of the same type can be tedious, time consuming and potentially detrimental to a business relationship, especially if the parties find themselves constantly revising and renegotiating agreement terms. Doing so can significantly slow down the time it takes to initiate sponsored research projects or productization of licensed inventions. The master agreement specifically covers standard terms that apply to a particular type of transaction between two parties. These agreements set out the basic framework 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 …

What are Orphan and Rare Diseases?

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Rare diseases affect very small populations of individuals. According to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), orphan diseases are those that specifically affect less than 200,000 people within the nation; many of these rare diseases are also genetic. Some of these rare diseases include cystic fibrosis, Huntingon’s disease, Aarskog syndrome, Waardenburg syndrome, and Fabry disease. During the summer of 2014, more than one hundred million dollars were raised in the fight against a rare disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—or ALS—through a movement called the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Participants would dump a bucket of ice water over their 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 licenses Read More …

Improving the Drug Discovery Process

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

At the turn of the century the National Institute of Health (NIH) set out to establish a national network of drug creation centers, where all investigators and researchers could have access to advanced state of the art drug screening technologies. Emory’s Chemical Biology Discovery Center (ECBDC), previously a node of the NIH’s Molecular Libraries Screening Centers Network and currently a member of the National Cancer Institute’s Chemical Biology Consortium (NCI CBC), was established in 2003 as a part of the NIH’s vision. There are traditionally two approaches that researchers take when attempting to identify and develop a new drug. The Read More …