Bridging the academia-industry divide

General Article

As the new head of Technology Transfer, Spencer Lemons is on a mission to bring research advances to market

Spencer Lemons, the new vice president for Industry Relations and Technology Transfer, and staff member Linda Billedo discuss a current project. Photo by Todd McNaught

Ask a CEO what makes a successful company, and he or she is likely to tick off a list that includes employee teamwork, profitable research activities and carefully guarded trade secrets.

Pose the analogous question to the head of a research institution like Fred Hutchinson, and you'll hear that the recipe for success must include independent thinking, open-ended investigation and dissemination of new ideas.

These distinct perspectives illustrate the well-known cultural divide between the two kinds of workplaces. Finding creative ways to bridge that gap to advance cancer research is the mission of Spencer Lemons, the center's new vice president for Industry Relations and Technology Licensing.

"My role is to figure out how we can mesh the two cultures to allow the center to establish new beneficial relationships with industry," he said. "When that happens, there is unlimited potential for innovative solutions to important problems in biomedical research."

In addition to building bridges with industry, Lemons will oversee all commercialization and intellectual property matters at the center, including patent applications and licensing of new discoveries, as well as assist with the creation of companies that spin off from potentially profitable center inventions, biological materials and software.

New industry collaborations

With his strong track record in facilitating the development of discoveries into products that benefit the public, Lemons will play a key role in many of the center's research initiatives, said Peggy Means, senior vice president for strategic planning. "We looked for a long time to find an individual with the right blend of scientific knowledge and business savvy," she said. "Spencer was the search committee's unanimous first choice and we are all very pleased he has joined us."

One of Lemons' first priorities in his new role will be to seek out new industry collaborations similar to the center's recent alliance with Intel Corporation. Through the affiliation, the center has become the first biomedical research institution with the opportunity to apply Intel's highly sensitive technology for fabricating the world's fastest computer chips to the development of improved ways to study, diagnose and prevent cancer. Both institutions view the collaboration as a long-term effort in which they will learn from one another how best to adapt advances in computing research to solve some of the most pressing problems in medicine and biology.

Lemons said that successful academic-industry collaborations such as this offer benefits to both parties.

"The appeal for industry to partner with a place like the center is that they get access to brilliant people who think differently and approach problems in unique ways," he said. "A university or research center is also a relatively inexpensive place for a company to try new things. Industry has very high indirect-cost rates and, typically, if they want to start a new project, it means they have to take people off other product-development projects, which may directly affect their bottom line."

Benefits to academia, industry

For academia, the benefit is often access to cutting-edge technology that is commercially unavailable or too expensive to acquire. It can also include funding for new research projects. Both are true of the center's collaboration with Intel. The company installed at Fred Hutchinson a powerful analytical device known as a Raman spectrometer that reveals the chemical structure of molecules. The instrument is the most sensitive of its kind. In addition, Intel has provided funds for pilot projects that allow center investigators to incorporate the Raman spectrometer into their own research and salary support for two on-site technicians to staff the facility.

Alliances with industry are critical for academic institutions to translate discoveries into products and treatments that benefit the public, Lemons said. Such activities typically require hundreds of millions of dollars and product-oriented focus and expertise, resources that may be impossible for a research center to match.

"The center's mission is not just to research and educate but also to advance treatment of cancer," Lemons said. "We have to take what's discovered at the lab bench and move it to the bedside — and collaborating with industry is necessary to do that."

A key goal of Fred Hutchinson's recently completed 2005 strategic plan is to apply this philosophy to several of the center's research initiatives, said Bob Nelsen, who chairs a committee on strategic partnership for Fred Hutchinson's foundation board.

"Many of the center's research initiatives would benefit from industry alliances, including drug discovery, immunotherapy, early detection research and vaccine development," he said. "All of these areas are enormously expensive to develop and have a long time horizon from concept to implementation. Partnering with industry creates the potential for investment in some of the more applied areas and a shorter time to market. The center's Technology Transfer Committee will work with faculty and the Industry Relations Office to explore these opportunities."

Lemons has extensive experience in forging industry partnerships and intellectual property management. Before joining the center, Lemons served as director of the Office of Technology Asset Management at Wake Forest University Health Sciences in Winston-Salem, N.C. Under his leadership, annual licensing revenues increased from $2.9 million to $32 million. In addition to the development of 13 new companies, he founded and led Seed Stage Associates, a for-profit subsidiary of Wake Forest that invests money in early stage discoveries to develop them into revenue-generating products.

Prior to Wake Forest, Lemons was associate director of technology transfer and industry research at North Carolina State University, an institution that has consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the country in industry-funded research. During his tenure there, the university formed more than 40 new startup companies and created its own $10 million venture-capital fund.

Annual licensing revenues at Fred Hutchinson average about $1 million. Many discoveries made at institutions like the center are early stage discoveries, which are difficult intellectual properties to protect and require substantial financial investment to develop into marketable products, Lemons said.

Commercial success

"With technology transfer, you have to treat it as you would a high-risk stock portfolio," he said. "Many technologies ultimately won't be profitable. But a few will be successful enough to make up for it. The goal is to put as many discoveries that have a chance of commercial success into the pipeline."

The success of all of his department's efforts will depend on the relationships Lemons' group fosters between individual researchers and industry, he said. Although Lemons may initiate the discussions, ultimately the researchers and industry contacts must work together to define the goals and expectations of the relationship.

"Our job is to act as facilitators and to get the lines of communication open," he said. "We try to find opportunities for both sides to talk and find common ground. The outcome will be novel solutions for today's major health problems."

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Productive discoveries and center spinoffs

Productive discoveries

Successful licensing programs arising from technologies developed at Fred Hutchinson include:

• Mylotarg, the first FDA-approved targeted-chemotherapy agent, which uses monoclonal antibody technology developed at the center
• A transgenic mouse system that permits scientists to express genes of interest in all mouse tissues
• Diagnostic test for lupus, an autoimmune disease

Center Spinoffs

Start-up companies that originated from Fred Hutchinson technologies include:

• Rosetta Inpharmatics (recently acquired by Merck)
• Targeted Growth Inc.
• Cell Therapeutics Inc.

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