Harvard University and its medical school have significant prestige in bioscience. In fact, in a 2006 report by the Milken Institute, Harvard came in first for generating the most published biotech research from 1998 to 2002. But when it comes to getting those discoveries out of the laboratory and into the marketplace?to help patients, and also to earn money for the university?Harvard has been a bit of a laggard. According to the Association of University Technology Managers, Harvard earned $21 million from licensing its IP in 2006. Not bad, but not in the top ten either; 12 other U.S. universities had more licensing revenue that year, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which pulled in more than $40 million, and the University of California system, with nearly $200 million.
“Well, that’s what we’re working on,” says Isaac Kohlberg, chief officer of Harvard’s three-year-old Office of Technology Development (OTD), a recent consolidation of Harvard’s undergraduate, graduate, and medical school tech transfer operations. Since his arrival in 2005, Kohlberg has doubled the pace of Harvard’s license dealmaking with the help of a new in-house transaction team, and in early 2007 the OTD established Harvard’s Technology Accelerator Fund with $6 million from individual donors. The Accelerator provides funding to early-stage Harvard research projects with promising commercial value; its goal is to close a much-bemoaned “development gap” by advancing nascent technologies to a stage where they become attractive to investment by Big Pharma, biotech companies, and venture capitalists. Although the Accelerator focuses on supporting medical research, it also supports research in the applied sciences, such as engineering.
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