Every year, university researchers discover potential new drugs, diagnostics, and medical devices that could transform patient care. Yet many of those ideas stall in the “valley of death,” the stretch between a promising experiment and a product mature enough to attract investors or industry partners.
Rutgers has spent the past eight years working to change that by building a self-sustaining fund that reinvests revenue from successfully commercialized technologies into the next wave of innovations while also surrounding faculty with industry expertise.
The results to date have been auspicious—so strong, in fact, that leaders from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked university officials to write a paper that now appears in Nature Biotechnology, explaining their model for others to follow.
“One of the key elements at Rutgers was to dedicate a portion of the licensing revenue coming from the successful commercialization of the university’s intellectual property assets back into the research and development of emerging technologies,” said Reynold A. Panettieri Jr., vice chancellor of translational medicine and science at Rutgers Health.
Full story: How the university turns royalties into a self-funding engine for innovation
