Innovation Powered by
Our vision is to be a leader in innovation management that creates value for the University of Utah, its stakeholders and society.
After University of Utah researchers and the Technology Licensing Office patent and develop a technology, our office markets that technology to companies with the goal of getting the technology licensed.
Our office leads the marketing efforts, but there are some ways you as an inventor can help us. Before we reach out to any external companies, we develop marketing materials that include a description of the invention, patent filings, market information, names of inventors and more. As we compile this information, we will reach out for your input.
At the same time, we conduct market research to identify the best companies for your technology. Existing relationships with companies are useful in marketing an invention. In fact, most license agreements come from an inventor’s network. Let us know if you have any suggestions of companies or people we should reach out to!
We then contact potential licensees through both emails and phone calls to share the marketing information we compiled. If any of these companies expresses an interest or has questions, we will reach out to you to schedule a teleconference with the potential licensee or request your answers to their questions.
Marketing your invention can occasionally lead to sponsored research and collaboration from industry partners. While sponsored research is not the most common outcome of our marketing efforts, these opportunities can bring funding and projects to your lab.
Do you have more questions about our office or our marketing efforts? Contact our commercialization team!
University of Utah startups continue innovating and discovering solutions to today’s unmet needs. Here’s a roundup of some of the latest news out of these companies:
Myriad Genetics Announces Third Patent Granted for Molecular Residual Disease (MRD) with Early Priority Date
Myriad Genetics, Inc., (NASDAQ: MYGN), a leader in genetic testing and precision medicine, announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued a third patent that will strengthen its ability to deliver a tumor-informed, high-definition, molecular residual disease (MRD) assay to market.
Myriad Genetics and Ultima Genomics to Explore the UG 100™ Sequencing Platform to Advance Clinical Test Offerings in Oncology and Reproductive Genomics
Myriad Genetics, Inc., (NASDAQ: MYGN), a leader in genetic testing and precision medicine, and Ultima Genomics, Inc., a developer of a revolutionary new ultra-high throughput next-generation sequencing (NGS) platform, announced a joint effort to explore Ultima’s UG 100™ sequencing platform and its ppmSeq™ technology to advance Myriad’s ability to offer groundbreaking clinical tests. Myriad has purchased a new UG 100 that will soon join other leading sequencing platforms in its new Lab of the Future facility in South San Francisco.
Recursion Announces FDA Clearance of Investigational New Drug Application for REC-1245, a Potential First-In-Class RBM39 Degrader for Biomarker-Enriched Solid Tumors and Lymphoma
Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX), a leading clinical stage TechBio company decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery, announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared an investigational new drug (IND) application for a Phase 1/2 clinical trial of REC-1245, a new chemical entity for the treatment of biomarker-enriched solid tumors and lymphoma.
Recursion hires new Chief People & Impact Officer
Recursion announced that Erica Fox has joined the company as Chief People and Impact Officer where she will help deliver business goals while focusing on organizational productivity, engagement and growth, as well as Recursion’s broader social impact.
Learn more about Recursion's new Chief People & Impact Officer
How much would you be impacted by a shoulder injury? According to Peter Chalmers, a University of Utah orthopaedic surgeon, pain in your shoulder can be more impactful on your quality of life than heart failure.
“Patients come in and tell me that their shoulder hurts, and they can't sleep, and they can't do the things they want to do,” Chalmers said. “If you can't use your arm, it's incredibly debilitating.”
Treating these patients in the clinic inspires Chalmers to research and create solutions that improve his patients’ lives. “It's only by seeing the people suffering with the problem and then trying to help them that I think you can truly motivate yourself to fix this for these people,” he said. “I think that helps us understand the importance of the work and the ways in which it can help people or improve the human experience.”
A common problem Chalmers sees in the clinic is a rotator cuff tear. These tears usually occur after years of the rotator cuff weakening before it finally tears, and even when a doctor repairs the torn rotator cuff, it is still not as good as it was before it weakened.
One of Chalmers’s colleagues Robert Tashjian, a fellow U orthopaedic clinician and researcher, found a tie between an estrogen receptor and rotator cuff tears after looking at data from the Utah Population Databank and his own patients. Once they were aware of the connection, they just needed to figure out how they could use it to improve outcomes for patients with rotator cuff tears.
Chalmers kept this information in the back of his mind while he went about his research and surgeries for the following years. It wasn’t until a casual conversation with another colleague—Jim Hotaling, a U urologist and associate vice president of research for commercialization—that ideas and plans started to fall into place.
It's all about your team. It's all about finding the right collaborators, the right partners, and then building those relationships with them so you can succeed together.
The two surgeons went for a run after their day in the operating room, and along the way they discussed the research they were working on. Chalmers mentioned Tashjian’s discovery and how they weren’t sure what to do with it, and Hotaling brought up the association between low hormone levels and loss of strength. From there, Chalmers conducted a database study looking at that connection.
“We looked at our own patients, and I started measuring hormone levels. I found that about 70% of my patients with rotator cuff tears also have low hormone levels,” Chalmers said. He then started studying the connection in animals and found that supplementing the animals with hormones clearly improved the animals’ recoveries.
While the hormones improved outcomes in the animals, studies have shown that supplementing hormones in humans can have systemic side effects like heart attacks, so the team of clinician-researchers needed a way to deliver hormones directly to the affected area. Chalmers reached out to the Louis S. Peery, MD Orthopaedic Innovation Center at the U to tap into their medical device and polymer expertise and the Technology Licensing Office to protect the resulting technology.
In order to continue developing the technology, the team would need more funding to support additional dosing and validation studies, so they applied for and received an Ascender Grant. Ascender Grants help U inventors bridge the funding gap between research and commercialization by providing support for technology development, proof of concept and more.
With the funding from the Ascender Grant and a team of researchers with different expertise, development on the technology is moving forward.
“It's all about your team,” Chalmers said. “It's all about finding the right collaborators, the right partners, and then building those relationships with them so you can succeed together.”
