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| Commercial Applications of Our Scientific Research The highest-quality research on basic scientific questions sometimes leads to breakthrough discoveries that have surprising consequences. One example is the birth-control pill, which was conceived in the Penn State laboratory of Professor Russell Marker, who was exploring the chemical composition of steroid hormones in the 1930s. One consequence of his research was the discovery of an economical process for making synthetic steroid hormones. Marker went on to form a company that developed his discovery into a commercial process for manufacturing cortisone, then his process later was used to develop the birth-control pill—a drug that has transformed the world by revolutionizing the way many people plan their families. Clearly, the essential value of scientific research at a university is the expansion of the frontiers of human knowledge. While some fundamental research does provide the foundation for the development of new commercial products, it is misleading to judge the value of all basic scientific research solely on the economic value of any products it may spawn. Nevertheless, it has been interesting while writing this story for Science Journal to discover some of the commercial ventures that have grown out of discoveries made in the research laboratories of our college. We hope you will enjoy reading the following brief summaries of some of these commercial ventures, beginning with more information about Professor Marker's adventures in applied chemistry.
One of the earliest commercial applications of Penn State Research, and possibly the largest, led to the founding of the Mexican pharmaceutical company, Syntex, now part of the Roche Group. Professor Russell Marker developed a revolutionary chemical synthesis for steroid hormones in the late 1930s and early 1940s, that became known as the "Marker Degradation." Prior to Marker's discovery, steroids could be isolated only in small amounts or synthesized by a long, complicated route. After developing his initial synthesis, Marker discovered a synthetic route for pregnandiol, a progesterone intermediate that used compounds isolated from Mexican yams as its starting material. In 1943, unable to obtain backing from American pharmaceutical companies for commercialization of the process, Marker left Penn State to do it himself in Mexico. With two partners, he formed Syntex S.A. in Mexico City in 1944 to produce low-cost progesterone, which became the main precursor in the industrial preparation of the anti-inflammatory drug cortisone. Although Marker left the company in 1945, Syntex eventually grew to one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies after using Marker's starting material to synthesize the first useful and economical oral contraceptive in 1951.
The now-familiar transdermal patch that delivers low doses of a drug over an extended period of time had its origin at Penn State. When Alec Keith was a professor of biophysics and pharmacology and Wally Snipes was a professor of biophysics at Penn State in the 1970s, they pioneered transdermal drug delivery by making research discoveries that later were developed into products that have improved the lives of so many people by helping them to absorb medications for health problems such as heart disease, hormone deficiencies, smoking addiction, bladder disorders, and osteoporosis. Stories still circulate within our college about Keith's early experiments with his "clinical trials" of transdermal drug delivery, in which he used himself as the experimental subject. He would make a patch containing a measured amount of nitroglycerine, then put it on himself before leaving his lab to attend a seminar. He then would stop whatever he was doing in order to remove the patch and note the elapsed time if he got a headache—which was his method of estimating the optimum dosage range for clinical use. The headaches were his indication that the dose was too strong. His reputation as a determined researcher continued later in his career when Keith, as the chief executive officer of Watson Pharmaceuticals, is said to have spent the majority of his time in the company's research laboratories rather than in its boardrooms. In 1984, Snipes and Keith founded Zetachron, a company whose applied drug research also had its roots in the Eberly College of Science. The merger of Zetachron and Watson Labs in 1991 formed a new company, Watson Pharmaceuticals. Keith was the founding president of Watson Pharmaceuticals and currently has a number of science-based commercial interests. Snipes continues to help commercialize new discoveries by Penn State biotechnology researchers. In 1999, for example, he donated to Penn State the Zetachron Center for Science and Technology Business Development. This center provides space and support at Penn State for new companies that are commercializing biotechnical research.
As one of the larger employers in State College, Minitab Inc., creates and markets statistical software for academic teaching, industrial statistics, and general-purpose statistics. The company's core statistics package, MINITAB, was initially developed in 1972 by three members of the Penn State statistics faculty to help professors teach statistics. The company's founders were Barbara F. Ryan, the current company president, Thomas A. Ryan, Jr., currently an emeritus professor of statistics, and Brian L. Joiner, a faculty member in the Department of Statistics at the time of Minitab's founding who has moved to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. With the success of the original MINITAB package and textbook, they decided to leave the University in 1982 to form a private company. During the initial startup, Penn State provided incubator office space and support services. In 1985, the company moved into its own offices. In the early 1990s, Minitab expanded its product line to focus on the general-purpose statistical software package for the industrial statistics market. According to the company, MINITAB is now used in more than 4,000 colleges and universities around the world and is referenced in nearly 450 textbooks. It also is used by businesses of all sizes in 80 different countries. Minitab currently employs a staff of about 175 people at its headquarters in State College and at two locations in Europe, and recently was awarded top honors in the Best Places to Work in PA award program of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, ranking first among Pennsylvania's medium-sized companies.
Biopore, Inc., a State College biotechnology company, was founded in 1987 and is focused on developing and commercializing innovative biotechnologies. The company's origin was in technologies developed at Penn State by faculty members including Roy Hammerstedt, who currently is professor emeritus of biochemistry. The development of the company's initial products, which were technologies for storing biological tissues, was independent of Penn State research. Hammerstedt explains, "At that time, commercialization was not strongly encouraged, but things have changed significantly in the last decade." In the early 1990s, Biopore licensed new technologies, which were based on research by Hammerstedt and other Penn State faculty members, for improving animal fertility. More recently, Biopore obtained licenses for research patents from Harry Allcock, Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry, for polymer applications and from Allen Phillips, professor emeritus of biochemistry, for diagnostic assay techniques. In 2003, BioPore licensed or sold its technologies to others well suited to complete the commercialization process. Hammerstedt then formed APD Life Sciences Inc., a startup company, which helps to develop ideas that are scientifically sound but not yet proven to be commercially viable. The company then turns the developed ideas over to others for final commercialization.
Chiral Quest was formed in 2000 to market technologies based on intellectual property developed by Xumu Zhang, professor of chemistry. Zhang's research focuses on developing catalysts used by the pharmaceutical industry to produce chemical compounds that have two forms, each a mirror image of the other—like a left and a right hand. These molecules, known as chiral compounds, are common in biological processes and make up more than one-third of the pharmaceutical drugs currently on the market. Often, one form is useful as a drug while the other is ineffective or even harmful. The catalysts developed by Zhang direct the production of the desired form of the molecule. Prior to forming Chiral Quest, Zhang licensed a number of patents to Catalytica Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by DSM—the largest manufacturer of fine chemicals. "We felt that forming our own corporation would be a more appropriate way to serve the pharmaceutical and fine-chemical industries," says Zhang. Managing his own technologies allows Zhang and his company to negotiate directly with any potential users and to benefit directly from all applications of the intellectual property that he developed. Chiral Quest, which currently holds licenses to eight patents developed by Zhang, has operations in Princeton, New Jersey, as well as in State College, Pennsylvania, and has nine employees. In February 2003, the company became listed as a public company on the over-the-counter market. It is the first business by an active Penn State faculty member to be publicly listed.
QuantumBio was founded in January 2002 by Kenneth M. Merz Jr, professor of chemistry, to develop and market software and data based on technology developed in Merz's lab. The company's initial product is a novel algorithm for quantum chemical calculations on large molecular systems. The calculations predict chemical interaction based on principles of quantum mechanics. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporations use QuantumBio software to calculate interactions between proteins and small molecules. These calculations provide a tool for the discovery of new drug candidates at a substantially lower cost than laboratory experimentation. Merz obtained startup funding for the company from the Ben Franklin Technology Partnership and from the Life Sciences Greenhouse of Central Pennsylvania. Ben Franklin provides to companies in central Pennsylvania direct funding and business support services, as well as assistance in obtaining outside funding. The Life Sciences Greenhouse is a combined public and private venture established to accelerate the development of life-sciences technologies in the region, to develop new startup companies, and to enhance existing life-sciences companies in central Pennsylvania. According to Merz, the local environment has been extremely supportive during the startup of QuantumBio. "Starting a business is very different from the academic environment," he says. "Unless you have a lot of natural entrepreneurial instincts, you don't want to try doing everything yourself. The Ben Franklin guys have been awesome and the Life Sciences Greenhouse has provided us with great support." Merz also credits Penn State's Intellectual Property Office for its assistance in obtaining the provisional patent and developing the technology. The provisional patent for this technology has been licensed from Penn State by QuantumBio.
When Michael Natan was a faculty member in Penn State's Department of Chemistry in the 1990s, he led a team that was doing research at the forefront of nanotechnology. While he was researching self-assembled colloidal-metal nanoparticles and biomolecular receptors, Natan conceived of Nanobarcodes™, which are microscopic particles sequentially electroplated with different metals within narrow channels to form metallic rods having complex striping patterns. Recognizing the commercial potential of his research, Natan prepared an intellectual-property portfolio that laid the foundations for a State College-based start-up company, Auspex Technologies, L.L.C. The quality of Natan's academic research and his high-energy, entrepreneurial personality captured the attention of Gordon Ringold, former CEO of Affymax Research Institute, and the legendary entrepreneur, Alejandro Zaffaroni. Ringold had formed SurroMed, a technology-based therapeutics company known for the discovery and development of biomarker-enabled drugs. Under Ringold's leadership, SurroMed purchased Auspex Technologies and hired Natan and a number of his former Penn State students. In addition, Natan continued to collaborate with members of his Penn State research team who continue to do fundamental scientific research at Penn State, including Christine Keating, who now is an assistant professor of chemistry. Keating says, "These particles represent a fundamentally new way to encode information on the submicron scale, which gives us more options for detection than previous techniques for particle encoding, plus they are easy to synthesize in what promises to be an incredible variety of distinguishable patterns." After several years, SurroMed spun off the Natan technology into a new startup, Nanoplex Technologies, Inc. Natan, as Nanoplex' CEO, guided the development of the Nanobarcode particles, which the company commercialized during 2003. The particles are useful in "multiplexed" bioassay systems for monitoring multiple biological reactions simultaneously in very small volumes of fluid, in multiplexed detection systems, for ultrasensitive molecular identification, and in the next-generation barcoding technology known as AutoID. Nanoplex envisions that these products will have commercial applications in the life sciences, security, environmental analysis, and process monitoring. Steve Miller and Barbara K. Kennedy Back to Science Journal Summer 2004 Index
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