tool name

Monday, Nov. 16, 2009

UK goes into business for itself, its inventions

Instead of watching big corporations profit from their ideas for new diagnostic tools, doctors and nurses at the University of Kentucky Hospital now can convert their concepts into reality.

The university has launched a for-profit company, Therix Medical, Inc., that will help create and market diagnostic tools and machines — not drugs — dreamed up by its own clinicians. It is particularly focused on those that can be developed in less than a year.

Perhaps as importantly, it will allow UK and its entrepreneurial medical staff to patent potentially lucrative ideas rather than give them away.

"There's no sense in letting somebody in Germany build a piece of diagnostic equipment ... and then sell it back to us," said Dr. John C. Gurley, director of UK's catheterization lab at the Cardiovascular Research Center. "Why don't we build it?"

It was Gurley who suggested launching such a venture in late 2007..

"A new diagnostic instrument that would change the way we look for a common disease — that could help our patients and could be highly profitable in a short period of time," Gurley said. "Those are the kinds of things we're interested in."

However, officials aren't offering any hints about specific devices.

Keeping the ideas under wraps is one of the key lessons they've learned about the patent process.

An idea leaked to the public before it is patented becomes fair game for anyone to develop. Doctors used to inadvertently do that by publishing academic papers about their concepts. Therix officials even are keeping their projects' code names top secret.

"I wish I could show you the things we have in our pipeline right now because they're very cool," said Gurley, who has offered several ideas that are in the works. "This is something we've learned over the last year and a half, is how to manage our intellectual property the right way."

Therix is the latest example of the ever-growing intersection of the university's academic and medical pursuits with entrepreneurial ambition and profit.

With UK and other public universities facing state funding constraints, money generated from faculty and staff-inspired start-up companies and licenses has become more than just a point of pride; it's a viable income stream.

UK President Lee T. Todd Jr. told city and business leaders at an economic development meeting last month that the university is trying many ways to encourage its faculty and medical employees to protect their ideas with patents and start their own companies.

Todd, who himself received patents on six pieces of technology while working on his doctoral degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said it has required a shift in mind-sets.

Therix, officially born in December 2007, received start-up money from the university and several key donors through Bluegrass Angels, an investor group of former and current business executives who provide seed money for promising Central Kentucky firms.

UK hospital doctors, nurses and technicians received their first briefing at an August "Clinician Innovation Day," at which they were given special patent notebooks — with pages like graph paper that make duplicates — for them to record their ideas.

No longer should they scribble down their concepts on an envelope or cocktail napkin, they were told.

Once a clinician with an idea brings it to Therix, the company will conduct a marketing and feasibility study. If it makes it through that step, it's sent to UK's Center for Manufacturing, where it's converted into a working prototype.

Therix already has turned four ideas from UK clinicians into prototypes and helped document concepts for one to two dozen more that have been put in the patent pipeline, said Dean Harvey, executive director of UK's Von Allmen Center for Entrepreneurship.

Therix has hired one employee: chief executive officer Jim Clifton of Lexington, who started Oct. 1. Eventually the company will have a support team of legal and financial experts.

Most of that work is handled by consultants now, Harvey said.

Ultimately, if a product takes off, Therix could spin off a company to manufacture it in Lexington to help patients worldwide.

"Our objective is to take an idea from the bedside, and commercialize it and return it — not just to our bedsides but bedsides everywhere else in the world in a short time frame," Gurley said.