Lab Bench to Commercialization program broadens its scope
One of the many ways that research can make an impact on everyday life or address societal challenges is through a process called translation, an early part of technology transfer, where novel ideas and inventions are aligned to market needs. For over a decade, the Eberly College of Science has supported this process through a competitive seed grant program designed to support translational research ideas. This Lab Bench to Commercialization Program (LB2C) is intended to support a culture of ideation and translational research, provide hands-on training to participants, identify adoption paths for technologies, and grow a pipeline of inventions that may lead to technology transfer, but not all research is ready, or even appropriate, for commercialization.
“We’ve really started to rethink the basic framework for how we run this program,” said Emily Kuhns, director for the college’s Office for Innovation. “In talking to our faculty, we’ve heard that many are not particularly interested in commercialization for the sake of commercialization. What they really want is for their research to have impact and matter to society. And they are also extremely interested in maximizing the career readiness of the graduate students and postdocs who work in their labs. We have also learned that we have many kinds of research discoveries that may reach adoption and impact through alternative mechanisms that our current processes aren’t supporting well.”
As such, the LB2C program is shifting its emphasis further upstream in the translation process. The program is intended to be the first step to support researchers as they evaluate translating their research into a tangible product or service that could be adopted by society. It will support projects at a very early stage in technology development and consider proposals to test a new idea that may lead to an invention, even if there is little to no preliminary data.
“We want to switch from a results driven mindset to an innovation driven mindset,” said Kuhns. “We don’t expect that our program will be a perfect fit for all of our faculty, but we want the program to be accessible to any Eberly researcher who has a translational idea that they want to explore.”
This year, the LB2C has been awarded to a project proposed by Sally Assmann, the Waller Professor of Biology; Phil Bevilacqua, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology; and Hong-Li Chou, assistant research professor of Biology. Their project explores a potential method to facilitate the proper folding of expressed proteins. This technology could eventually be used for making protein-based therapeutics, vaccines, diagnostics, and other functional protein technologies. Over the course of their award, the researchers will work collaboratively with the Office for Innovation to evaluate the business and intellectual property considerations while they develop the technology.
“In the previous model, this project was too early for LB2C funding, and they would have had to develop the technology on their own before we would consider funding them,” said Kuhns. “This puts a huge burden on the researchers to navigate the intellectual property and examine the market needs on their own. Not only is this a massive bottleneck to participation in translational research, but we also often see great technologies reach a dead end if the market needs and intellectual property landscape were not considered early enough in the technology development. In the current model we can provide this expertise to assist any researcher while also giving them funding to explore their idea.”