Promising patents Four university inventors who hope to turn a profit Archived article from Dec 8, 2000 By Laurel Van Leer   Streptomycin, plastic lumber, Jersey asparagus, specialty lawn grasses - all these commercially successful products started out as the brainchildren of Rutgers faculty. Each year, faculty disclose more than 100 inventions. With the help of the Office of Corporate Liaison and Technology Transfer (OCLTT), many of these are patented and then licensed to existing companies or spun off as new businesses. Since OCLTT opened in 1989, the university has spun off 35 companies, making Rutgers a national leader among universities without medical schools, says Bill Adams, director of the office. The inventions featured here are in the very early stages of commercial development, but all show bright promise. A new kind of aspirin It's first period and 300 tired students are more or less listening to instructions for preparing acetylsalicylic acid from salicylic acid - the active ingredient in aspirin - for an upcoming organic chemistry laboratory. Meanwhile, Kathryn Uhrich, associate professor of chemistry, is multitasking. While she's teaching, part of her brain is mulling over a weightier research problem - how to create an elastic artificial skin from polymers. Also in this story: Foods that fight cancer The gene for schizophrenia Ankle games In a flash the two lines of thought come together, and Uhrich realizes with a rush that salicylic acid can be formulated as a polymer, a long chain of small molecules strung together like beads on a string. The idea is rich with possibilities. For one thing, the linking molecules - the string - could be designed to fall apart in the alkaline environment of the intestine, rather than in stomach acid. This may reduce the stomach irritation that is sometimes a side effect of regular aspirin tablets. An intestinal release also increases absorption so a patient needs to take less. And the idea isn't confined to aspirin. Antibiotics or other medications could also be strung in polymer chains, Uhrich says. The polymers could be designed to fall apart in a specific body location, either all at once or in a time-release fashion. Polymer medications could also be imbedded in plastic sutures and artificial skin to target a wound. The whole experience was surreal, recalls Uhrich, who later named her discovery PolyAspirin™ although she sometimes calls it "plastic aspirin," because plastic is the most widely recognized polymer. Once she described her research at a science symposium last August, major pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer and Roche started calling her lab to discuss the possibilities. She's received research funding from Johnson & Johnson, DuPont and the National Institutes of Health. As exciting as it was to realize that her discoveries could help people, Uhrich maintains she is first and foremost an academic scientist. She knew she didn't want to develop and market products. "I'm a professor. I'm a researcher. I'm here to teach," she states. So this past summer, she spun off a company, Polymerix Corporation, with the support and encouragement of Rutgers. The business end is being handled by Karen Giroux and Robert Butz, who originally were asked to serve as consultants, but were so impressed with Uhrich's discoveries that they became founding investors as CEO and president of Polymerix, respectively. Soon afterward, Richard Woodward, also a consultant, joined as vice president of operations. Rutgers will share in Polymerix's profits through the licensing agreements and equity holding. Rutgers has nine pending patent applications that Polymerix is licensing from the university. The company will broadly market technologies with medical, dental, cosmetic and industrial uses. It may also be useful in treating periodontal disease, healing after hip replacement surgery and repairing broken bones. In the works is a polymer version of a tuberculosis drug, as well as drugs that can treat inflammatory bowel disease. Uhrich is also working on something called water-soluble polymeric micelles, a polymer that shrink-wraps another chemical. Because this polymer package dissolves completely and clearly in water, it has caught the interest of the cosmetics industry. Someday water-based makeup and crystal-clear shampoo may result from Uhrich's micelles. PolyAspirin ™ is expected to begin clinical trials in a few years. Foods that fight cancer An apple a day keeps the doctor away - or so the old rhyme would have us believe. But maybe the health conscious should be eating oranges instead. Orange peels, that is. A New Jersey company, using a process developed and patented at Rutgers, is getting ready to market an extract of orange peel it says can help prevent colon cancer. The extract works by suppressing a gene that, when activated, promotes cancer cell growth. The orange peel essentially regulates the gene, says David Evans, CEO of WellGen. WellGen, incorporated in December 1998, was spun off from Rutgers to develop and market functional foods, also known as nutraceuticals. These are foods, or extracts of foods, that go beyond providing general-purpose energy and nutrition, explains Geetha Ghai, assistant director at the Center for Advanced Food Technology (CAFT). Functional foods actually have a specific role in preventing a disease or reducing an adverse health effect. However, there is sometimes only the vaguest evidence that they work. "There is a lot of folkloric information out there," Ghai says, "We wanted to put some science into the process." About four years ago, several Rutgers researchers got together to see how that could be done. A grant funded by the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology through the R&D Excellence Program helped the team realize its vision. In addition to Ghai, the team members are Robert Rosen, associate director of CAFT; Chi-Tang Ho, professor of food science; Kuang Yu Chen, professor of chemistry; and Mou-Tuan Huang, professor in the Laboratory for Cancer Research. They collaborate with faculty at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, the University of Hawaii and New York's Strang Cancer Center. The result is a test that uses a specially prepared tissue culture to determine if a specific food has the ability to turn off a cancer-causing gene or, alternatively, turn on a gene that fights cancer. Different foods can be tested on copies of the same gene, allowing researchers to easily sift through many compounds to identify those that produce the desired effect. Rutgers licenses this patented process to WellGen and is a major shareholder in the company. WellGen is currently focusing on identifying products to prevent colon, prostate and breast cancer. In addition to orange peel, the company has already found cancer-fighting properties in grapes, Mexican bamboo, Vietnamese mint, licorice and black tea. Evans is working with several investors, including a venture capital firm and a large food company. Interestingly, one investor is Hills Pet Food, a subsidiary of Colgate-Palmolive. Evans says an anticancer pet food supplement is under discussion and may be marketed next year. Since cancer is the second leading cause of death for domestic dogs and cats, after automobiles, a cancer-fighting pet food has tremendous consumer appeal. A human supplement based on the orange extract, mostly likely in pill form, is also expected to be available next year. The gene for schizophrenia Scientists have long believed that genes play a role in the psychiatric disorder schizophrenia. Linda Brzustowicz, associate professor of genetics, now knows where at least one of the players lives. She's tracked it to a specific chromosome, but she won't be satisfied until she has identified its exact location. Rutgers has filed a provisional patent application on the use of Brzustowicz's work to diagnose and treat schizophrenia. Filing a patent application allows academics to publish their findings without fear of losing their intellectual property rights, explains Diane Ambrose of the Office of Corporate Liaison and Technology Transfer (OCLTT). Working with colleague Anne Bassett of the University of Toronto, Brzustowicz analyzed genetic material from nearly 300 people in 22 Canadian families with a history of schizophrenia. The analysis found the strongest proof to date of a genetic susceptibility to the disease. The work, which was published in the journal Science last April, could lead to a diagnostic screening test in as little as a year, says Vincent Smeraglia, patent manager at OCLTT. Rutgers is talking with major pharmaceutical companies about licensing the information needed to develop such a test. While such news is exciting, Brzustowicz warns that being genetically prone to a disease does not necessarily mean that a person will develop that disease. Brzustowicz, who recently moved from the Newark campus to the Nelson Biological Labs on the Busch campus, hopes her work will ultimately lead to a drug or treatment for schizophrenia. That is largely why she is patenting the gene. "I'm doing this because I really want what I discover to get to patients, to help people," says Brzustowicz, who is a medical doctor board-certified in psychiatry. It seems counterintuitive to patent the gene, but Ambrose says this is actually a tried-and-true marketing strategy. Pharmaceutical companies do not want to invest money in developing a new drug unless they are guaranteed exclusivity, Ambrose points out. "The companies want a guarantee of a limited monopoly, and that's what a patent and a license provide." Brzustowicz is happy to leave the details of the patenting process to others. "I have enough on my hands just trying to find the exact location of the gene," she says. Ankle games A New Jersey man recovering from a stroke can finally button his own shirt thanks, in part, to a unique glove invented at Rutgers. The man had lost the use of his right hand and remained disabled even after completing conventional physical therapy years ago. He then tried the Rutgers Glove, performing video-gamelike exercises in conjunction with a neurorehabilitation program developed by a team that included Professor Howard Poizner of the Newark campus, Professor Alma Merians of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) and Professor Michael Recce of the New Jersey Institute of Technology. After just two weeks, the patient regained significant hand motor skills. "He's our success story," says Grigore Burdea, director of the Human Machine Interface Laboratory at the Center for Advanced Information Processing. Burdea and his colleagues invented the glove and a similar device called the Rutgers Ankle. Both inventions have received patents and are being field-tested to show potential investors what Burdea already knows: They work. "Both are ready to be licensed, but the area is still so new" that investors are wary, Burdea laments. As is common with inventions that are ahead of the curve, "the novelty of the technology works against us." Both devices use a forced-feedback system connected to a video "game." The patient straps the injured hand or foot into the device and uses it to manipulate an on-screen image. Settings can be adjusted to varying levels of difficulty, requiring either more movement or more strength. The Rutgers Ankle, which looks like a foot stool with boot straps, currently has the more interesting game. By twisting and turning the ankle, a patient guides a small plane though a maze of picture frames floating in a blue sky. A successful fly-through turns a frame yellow and earns the patient game points. "Patients love it and want to try harder and harder patterns, each requiring more dexterous movements," Burdea says. Burdea worked with Judith Deutsch, associate professor of physical therapy at UMDNJ, to create this engaging program designed to improve patients' range of motion, strength and coordination. To be effective, ankle therapy requires long and intense repetitive exercise, Deutsch points out. The Rutgers Ankle makes this tedious process much more appealing. "There's no question that patients enjoyed it and were able to do repetitive motions for an intense, focused period of time," she says. Jeff Fitzgerald, a physical therapist at Suburban Physical Therapy in Cedar Grove, where the ankle was tested in August, agrees. "Five minutes with the Rutgers Ankle went much faster than five minutes in regular therapy," says Fitzgerald, who used the ankle on patients from age 15 to 75. The computer program also records a wealth of information about the patient's progress that a doctor or therapist can review later. If the device is connected via the Internet, that information is available even if a patient completes the exercises at home. Home monitoring is an important therapy tool because traveling to a clinic may prolong the time needed for recovery, Burdea says.

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