Brown University and Prof Clear Hurdles to Nanopore Manufacturing IP Transfer

Brown University has entered into a technology-transfer agreement with NABsys, a startup company co-founded by Xinsheng Ling, an associate professor of physics at the university.

Many academic institutions are encouraging entrepreneurship among faculty as technology transfer gains increasing economic importance given today's R&D environment where innovation shifts to the academic sector, with the commercial sector serving as marketing partner.

DNA sequencing technology is a prime example. Today's electrophoresis-based methods for sequencing DNA are expensive and while companies like Applied Biosystems are continually investing in optimizing the technology, they are unable to make more than incremental progress in lowering the costs of these methods.

So, government agencies like the NSF and the NIH are providing grant funds to encourage breakthrough technology development with the goal of bringing down the cost of sequencing a genome by an order of magnitude.

Ling's lab received $1.5 million in NSF funding for its technology research efforts. In July, NABsys took in $225,000 in seed funding from the Slater Center for Biomedical Technology.

In the exclusive licensing agreement announced in July, Brown takes a significant but undisclosed equity stake in the company, ending a period of acrimony between Ling, who claimed to have invented the technology while on sabbatical, and the university, which said essentially, So what? You were on payroll, we own it. The issue appeared to be over ambiguity in Brown's intellectual property and tech transfer policies, which the faculty amended in May.

With the seed funding, NABsys [Nanopore Array Biosystems] of Providence, RI, will begin to develop Ling's ideas for a method of manufacturing addressable nanopore arrays from silicon.

Nobel Laureate Leon Cooper, director of the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems at Brown University, joins Ling as co-founder. Barrett Bready, 28 and the holder of a medical degree from Brown, is the chief executive officer. (Click here to view a PDF of an article on NABsys from Mass Hi Tech.)

Tags – [DNA sequencing, technology transfer, academic entrepreneur ]