STTR Funding for Your Start-up

Early stage start-ups are often looking for resources to advance their company and products. Start-ups from institutions like Emory are no different. The Small Business Administration’s Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) program might provide a solution for these entrepreneurs. The STTR program was created in 1992. All federal agencies with extramural research budgets over certain thresholds must participate in STTR and set-aside a required portion of their funds for these programs. Currently there are five agencies with STTR programs. The intent is for domestic small businesses to participate in research and development with commercialization potential. The STTR is described as a program, “that expands funding opportunities in the federal innovation research and development arena.” The initiative is sponsored by various Federal agencies, like the National Science Foundation and the Department of Health and Human Services, with the goal of forming partnerships with the private sector through the support of commercialization of research. The STTR support fund is formed by the participating agencies which have to set aside portions of their budget for small business technology transfer research awards. After an agency accepts a small business’ proposal for funding, it enters into the three-phased program. In the first phase, the

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2017 Annual Celebration of Technology & Innovation

Each year, the Emory University Office of Technology Transfer hosts an Annual Celebration of Technology and Innovation. This event brings together Emory administration, researchers, industry and many others from our local community to celebrate the research and innovation of Emory’s faculty. Each year brings a new lineup of guest speakers and presentations. Last year’s Celebration included two inventor presentations, including a videos and a few words from inventors of two successful Emory University technologies. Emory’s Associate General Counsel, Chris Kellner, shared a few words and became the first recipient of our OTTer Award. We also heard from former Provost and current President of Emory University, Claire E. Sterk. Most importantly, we celebrate our inventors! Emory University faculty members are awarded for, based on the previous calendar year: Deal of the Year, Startup of the Year, Innovation of the Year, and Significant Event of the Year. Join us on Thursday, March 2 at 4pm to celebrate the work of our inventors and congratulate our 11th Annual Celebration of Technology and Innovation awardees. You can visit our Annual Celebration page to find more information about past Annual Celebration’s, including award recipients, pictures and videos. You can also RSVP for this year’s Annual

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From the Director: Highlights from Fiscal Year 2016

2016 proved to be a very productive year for the Office of Technology Transfer. For starters, we completed our first year as a combined office with Emory’s Industry Contracting Group. Altogether we executed a total of 2,144 contracts — most of them with industry –on Emory’s behalf. While material transfer and confidentiality agreements far outnumber other contract types, it is those other contracts that take the most time and effort to negotiate. Not only have the two offices gotten to know each other much better, but we created additional tools that have improved our ability to more effectively manage our business. Industry funding continues to be crucial component in the support of the academic research enterprise and in 2016 we saw an all-time high of $52.5M in funding from companies. Of this total, $35.5M was received in support of clinical work needed for the approval of new therapies and medical devices. Focusing on products, Emory sub-licensee Blue Earth Diagnostics, received FDA approval for Axumin™ to diagnose recurrent prostate cancer. This technology was invented and disclosed in 1995 by Mark Goodman, PhD from our Department of Radiology. On a similar note, Baxalta received European approval to market Obizur™ for acquired hemophilia

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SBIR Funding for Your Start-up

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, success in the first few years led to its adoption by the Small Business Administration which mandated that government agencies should set aside SBIR funding. Each federal agency, which have research and development budgets greater than $100 million, are required to commit at least 2.8 percent of these budgets to SBIR funding. The eleven agencies that participate in the program have their own guidelines for acceptance under Congress’s established legislation. They are listed below along with links to their SBIR pages: Department of Agriculture National Institute of Standards and Technology National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Department of Defense Department of Education Department of Energy Department

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Funding Your Start-up

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 is the most common type of financing in small business. Given the costs involved with a pharmaceutical or medical device company this approach can be challenging, but for a software company can be a successful approach. Friends and Family: Sometimes the best way to gain access to funding is through the people who are closest to you. Tapping your family and friends to invest in your start-up can strain relationships and is only advisable if they fully understand the risks involved with your start-up. Forbes suggests that a loan from friends and family is sort of like a “grant with

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We’re Now on LinkedIn – Be Sure to Follow Us!

Our new LinkedIn Showcase page will provide information regarding Emory technologies, start-ups, successes, office news or events, and cool research from Emory. This page will allow us to share the happenings of technology transfer with the business community in a convenient location. We hope you will follow us at http://bit.ly/EmoryOTT_LinkedIn. We look forward to connecting with our business partners. LinkedIn is the largest professional and business orientated social media sites, connecting millions of individuals across the globe. The platform continues to seek new ways to connect individuals and companies in meaningful ways. One of the options available to large, multi-unit companies are Showcase Pages. These pages are an extension of a company page and provide an organization to “showcase” a sub-unit or product. A showcase page has its own followers and status updates independent of the company.

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

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, a physicist. And I had a great deal of experience with computers and computer software, which was unusual for a scientist working in the 1960s. Back then, cardiology was the most quantitative modality that existed and it probably still is today. Meaning that the cardiologists were and are interested in numbers and quantitative data. So, I thought that I would apply my scientific background to the art of image interpretation. Who has impacted you the most in your career and why? That’s a tough question, there is the physicist part of me. So, I am definitely motivated by the life

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The Ever-Confusing World of Contract Lingo – Part 2

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 with the knowledge that the other party is relying on that fact to make an agreement. If one makes a false representation, it can allow the other party to have the contract be voided or seen as a fraud in the inducement, meaning that an intentionally untrue fact was construed in the contract. For example we often represent that we have the ability to enter into the contract, or that to the best of our knowledge we are owner of a certain technology. Warranty: A promise of the reliability of a given product or service. If a warranty is incorrect,

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Research Tools as Building Blocks

Every great invention requires two things: an idea and the necessary resources. Life science and research are no different. For every novel compound, new vaccine and therapeutic, there is a research tool that helped advance the idea and hopefully becoming the next innovation in health. “Research tools are reagents, kitted products and even services which enable researchers to make new scientific discoveries,” says Rob Burgess, VP Global Business Development at RayBiotech, Inc. “Research tools streamline and normalize the scientific discovery process.” Research tools come in many forms, including antibodies, assays, cell lines and more. Erwin Van Meir, PhD, Professor in the Emory University School of Medicine and Director of the Laboratory for Molecular Neuro-Oncology describes these tools as “the researchers’ equivalent to the mason’s trowel used to put together bricks and mortar into house walls.” Research tools are often developed from scratch in the laboratory, but can also be purchased from companies which specialize in their development and manufacturing. “Research tools are created by a variety of techniques, one of them being genetic engineering,” says Van Meir. Often the development of the tools is in order to fill a specific need in the lab. “We buy and design plasmids, cell

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The Ever-Confusing World of Contract Lingo – Part 1

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 parties. Those parties can be individuals, companies, organizations, or as is the case with most contracts OTT handles, the university and an industry partner. Contract law is governed by state law. Courts review contracts based on the law of the contractually specified state or the state in which the contract was formed. Common Contract Terms & Concepts Recitals: Preliminary statements at the beginning of a contract that presents the background and purpose for the contract. Recitals are not part of the actual contract and are merely considered statements that set the stage for the relationship contemplated in the contract and

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Leveraging Emory OTT to Build Your Product Pipeline Revisited

At any given time Emory has approximately 600 technologies available to license. However whether a startup or an established company, finding new technologies available at a university is time-consuming and sometimes frustrating. We often are asked about the best ways to learn about our technologies available for licensing. We are pleased to announce one of our newest resources – TechFeed. By subscribing to the TechFeed notification system you can receive emails with recently added technologies matching your specified criteria and at your desired frequency. Sign-up once and the system will keep you informed. Additional easy ways to find and remain up-to-date with all the technologies coming out of Emory University. Use our Search option in the Technology Listings page to find non-confidential summaries of the technologies available. It’s run by Google and provides an improved searching experience and more accurate results. Looking for anything around a specific indication or topic? On the same Technology Listings page, click on Keywords in our word cloud and Technology Categories to get a list of those technologies. Subscribe to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter @EmoryOTT to see all our new technologies as soon as they are listed on the website. Visit

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

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. Patent Review Process Jargon Amending the Claim/Amendment: After the patent has been filed, if it is discovered that an aspect of the invention already mentioned within the patent is not fully described or drawn, the patent may be amended to properly describe it. Office Action: After a patent application is submitted, the case is assigned an examiner, who evaluates the application for language and structure as well as prior art. If the application is rejected (which most are initially) the case’s examiner will provide this document explaining why. Non-final Office Action: The Office Action sent after the patent application’s first

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IP Jargon: What are they talking about? – Part 1

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. In this part we will cover jargon found in patent statutes and applications. Patent Statue Jargon Statutory Subject Matter: Something that can be legally protected under a patent. There are four categories of ideas that can be protected by patents: process (a series of steps), machine (an object consisting of parts), manufacture (an object produced by giving new form to raw materials), and composition of matter (compositions of two or more substances.) Bar date (aka Statutory Bar Dates): Dates that are triggered by statue in the patent application process. If any date is missed all potential rights are lost. These are similar to statute of limitations. Provisional Patent Application: Acts almost as a “placeholder” for a patent application, a provisional application will

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From the Director: Navigating Proof of Concept Funding – Part 2

 In 2014, the Office of Technology Transfer created a proof of concept (POC) fund. This fund was created to address the lack of funding in the “Valley of Death,” between basic scientific research and a demonstrable product. The POC fund is designed to help move technologies closer to the market. See our previous blog when the POC fund was launched here https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/techtransfer/2014/12/p-o-c-fund-gears-up-to-help-bridge-the-v-o-d/. See part one of this interview here.   How was OTT’s first investment chosen? Are there any other inventions that are in the process of applying for funding? The first investment was chosen because we happened to have a cardiologist that had a great idea for a new device at that time to deliver stem cells to the heart. There were some potential challenges as to how you would make that and she had become aware of an industry expert in California that had expertise in making cardiovascular devices. Engaging this expert was going to cost between $10,000 and $40,000 and that became a great opportunity to use the proof of concept fund. We had interest from the Coulter Translational fund, but being able to get that initial feedback on what that prototype might look like put the

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From the Director: Navigating Proof of Concept Funding – Part 1

In 2014, the Office of Technology Transfer created a proof of concept (POC) fund. This fund was created to address the lack of funding in the “Valley of Death,” between basic scientific research and a demonstrable product. The POC fund is designed to help move technologies closer to the market. See our previous blog when the POC fund was launched here https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/techtransfer/2014/12/p-o-c-fund-gears-up-to-help-bridge-the-v-o-d/.   What is a proof of concept fund? A proof of concept fund, generally speaking, is non-diluted funding that can be used to take an early stage idea and get it to a proof of concept or proof of principle stage. Although this stage has different meanings for different people, at a macro level, it means that there needs to be evidence that the invention works for its intended purpose. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to use it in humans. There could be an animal model or even a cellular model that is viewed as the standard for a particular disease, which could be used for this proof of concept stage. What motivated OTT to create such a fund? One of our biggest challenges is that the inventions that are disclosed to the office are very early

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Technology Transfer – Asian Style

Asia, like the United States, has its own resources for technology transfer. Asia is home to many organizations that connect the region to promote training and networking, and these organizations have been critical for the astonishing success during the past decades. The key organizations that foster this success include: Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) Asia, Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), and Asian and Pacific Centre for Transfer of Technology. These organizations allow for a high level of regional interdependence within Asian technology transfer, which has benefited the region greatly. This week people from all over the world are meeting at AUTM’s meeting in Asia, or AUTM Asia, in Chiang Mai, Thailand to discuss technology transfer in Asia. To spotlight this yearly event, we highlight technology transfer organizations and efforts in Asia this week. BIO is a global trade association that consists of academic institutions, biotechnology companies, and other biotechnology-related organizations. The association is divided into four sectors: emerging companies, food and agriculture, health, and industrial and environmental. The scope is vast, but the organization strives to connect innovators through global dialogue, networking opportunities, and educational programming. BIO Asia will host the International BIO conference in March

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