NEWS OF THE WEEK
TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER: President
Obama unveils initiatives to encourage, support commercialization RESIDENT BARACK OBAMA announced seven initiatives to speed up the transfer of research from the lab to the market. Involving the government, universities, and private groups, the initiatives include a prize, public-private collaborations, and federal programs to encourage commercialization, enhance technology transfer, and assist entrepreneurs. Obama described the initiatives during the signing of the historic patent overhaul legislation at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology, in Alexandria, Va., on Sept. 16. “This is the economy we need to build—one where innovation is encouraged, education is a national mission, and new jobs and businesses take root right here in America,” Obama said. Two initiatives aim to accelerate drug development and help biotech entrepreneurs. The first is a partnership between NIH, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and FDA to develop a chip to quickly screen drugs for toxicity and effectiveness. NIH plans to spend up to $70 million over the next five years to develop the drug-screening chip, and DARPA is expected to spend about the same amount. The second is a change that would make it easier for start-up companies to license technologies patented by NIH and FDA intramural researchers: For companies that are less than five years old and have fewer than 50 employees, the cost and paperwork involved in licensing technologies in the NIH-FDA portfolio would be less. Through another initiative, small businesses will also get a hand from a collaborative pilot program by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, NSF, and the Small Busi-
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ness Administration. The program will initially provide comprehensive intellectual property support to 100 NSF Small Business Innovation Research grant recipients, and it will engage external professionals to provide pro bono or low-cost IP services to recipients. Three initiatives would facilitate tech transfer out of universities. The first is a new competition—the University Commercialization Prize. Details are not yet available, but NSF, the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science are together investing some $400,000 to support the prize. The competition is intended to identify and promote incentives to adopt best practices that improve commercialization efforts by academia. The second is a push by the Administration, with the aid of the Association of American Universities and the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities, to work with 135 university leaders to bolster entrepreneurship by building stronger ties between academia and industry, investors, and federal agencies. And the third is the addition of four universities to the Coulter Foundation’s Translational Research Partnership Program, which provides support to universities to encourage translational research. The final initiative Obama announced is the development, by January 2012, of a “Bioeconomy Blueprint” detailing Administration-wide steps to harness biological research innovations to address national challenges in health, food, energy, and the environment.—BRITT CHIP SO MO DEVIL L A/N EWSCO M
MOVING FROM LAB TO MARKET
Before signing the patent reform bill and announcing several techtransfer initiatives, Obama watched a demonstration of a robot created by students of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology.
ERICKSON AND SUSAN MORRISSEY
INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE Former Dow scientist admits to theft of trade secrets Former Dow AgroSciences scientist Kexue Huang has agreed to plead guilty to two counts of stealing trade secrets from Dow Chemical and Cargill. If a federal judge in Indianapolis accepts the deal between Huang and federal prosecutors at a hearing on Oct. 18, Huang will avoid a trial scheduled for the end of October. He could receive up to 15 years in prison and a $500,000 fine on one count and 10 years and another $500,000 fine on the second count. Huang, 46, worked for Dow between
2003 and 2008. He was first arrested by the FBI in July 2010 on charges that he stole information related to the biosynthesis of Dow’s Spinosad-brand spinosyn insecticide (C&EN, July 26, 2010, page 9). According to the plea deal, while he was employed at Dow, Huang applied for funding from the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China. He then used the money to direct R&D at Hunan Normal University on some of the same spinosyn-related technology he had researched for Dow. He also sent spino-
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syn material to a university scientist. Huang also admits he stole an enzyme under development for a new food product from Cargill, which is identified in court documents as Company A. Huang sent the DNA sequence of the enzyme to a student he was mentoring in China. A Cargill spokeswoman tells C&EN that Huang worked for the firm between 2008 and 2009. She adds that Cargill cooperated with the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office in pressing the case against him.—MARC REISCH
