Commercialization of faculty discoveries is on the rise at UNLV, facilitated by a new emphasis on economic development associated with research, according to Thomas Piechota, interim vice president for the recently renamed Division of Research and Economic Development.
“We want to bring greater attention to the important role the university plays in bringing economic vitality and diversity to our community and state,” Piechota says, adding that the university’s workforce development, business startup advising, and private-sector partnerships all support this effort.
“But one of the principal ways we contribute to economic development is by supporting commercialization of faculty discoveries through technology transfer,” he adds.
Technology transfer is the process through which the university’s discoveries, or intellectual property, are transferred to another organization – typically in private industry – for the purpose of development and commercialization. This activity has become increasingly important to research universities across the country as they seek to contribute to economic development in their communities and states while generating a valuable revenue stream. Some notable results of the technology transfer process are Google and Gatorade, both products originally invented in a university setting.
Technology transfer activity at UNLV has increased dramatically in recent years. The university has filed 31 patent applications in the last four years; it has more than 140 research disclosures on file and 14 issued patents listing UNLV inventors. Twenty-seven research disclosures have been submitted in the last twelve months alone.
UNLV faculty have produced a wide variety of intellectual property with great commercialization potential. Here is just one of the most promising projects.
Genome Surgery and xReader
Martin Schiller, Life Sciences Professor
Each week a group of students gather in life sciences professor Martin Schiller’s bioinformatics lab to discuss what they have been reading in scientific journals.
It was here, in a nondescript room with brown leather couches, where the idea for a new approach to genome surgery was first discussed. From this exchange, Schiller and his team developed a novel idea combining two technologies with bioinformatics tools to remove disease-causing DNA from cells.
The discovery could lead to a new way to treat HIV/AIDs.
UNLV recently submitted a patent application for this idea to the U.S. Patent Office, a development of huge impact to Schiller.
“Unless someone else submitted an application for the exact thing before we did, we may own a big advancement in medicine at UNLV,” says Schiller, explaining his discovery with a short lesson on the way some viruses interact with DNA.
“When a person is infected with some pathogenic viruses, such as HIV, the virus inserts its DNA and becomes part of the DNA of the infected cells,” he says, explaining that patients receiving drug therapy may get well temporarily, but the DNA of the virus remains behind. Later, it can become reactivated, and the patient relapses.
“Latency is when you have the virus in your genome, but it isn’t actively producing infective virus,” says Schiller, who came to UNLV in 2009 from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. “This is the reason you can’t cure someone of AIDS. You can lower the viral levels for a functional cure as long as the person stays on a cocktail of drugs the rest of their lives. But as soon as you take them off the drugs, the virus explodes and mutates. At that point, the drugs no longer work.”
Schiller notes that a technology exists allowing researchers to specifically target and cut out a region of DNA – which, he reasoned, could be employed to fight latent HIV infection. But there is another pertinent technology that emanates from HIV itself – it is a protein that can actually travel across cellular membranes; scientists have learned how to harness the protein to deliver a change to the interior of a cell.
“What we did is combine these two technologies,” says Schiller, “while taking advantage of our bioinformatics expertise.”
By “bioinformatics,” he is referring to his laboratory’s tremendous amount of biological information on the human genome with its 23,000 genes and resulting proteins. His lab is known for its comprehensive database on short contiguous peptide sequences that are known to have a function in at least one protein. Schiller credits an undergraduate student in his lab, Horacio Guerra, with using this vast database and the Los Alamos HIV sequence database to help identify the right region to target in the HIV cells.
Schiller’s team analyzed thousands of different HIV sequences and determined parts in the HIV genome where a mutational change is very rare, indicating that these are critical genomic elements of HIV (and good sites to target for intervention). Then, in the laboratory, they designed a protein to enter the cells of a person with a latent HIV infection, and snip out those parts of the genome, effectively killing it.
In humans, blood stream injection would be used to deliver this discovery. Because it has a portion of a protein from HIV itself, it would move across cell membranes.
Still, Schiller acknowledges that much additional work is needed before this technology will be approved for use in humans. He notes that there are four stages of development to bring this product to market: The first stage is to show that the protein works in a test tube, which has been successfully accomplished in his lab.
The second stage is to grow active HIV cultures in the lab, and when this protein is added, it should cure the infection in a dish of cells. Schiller notes that Christy Strong, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab, is currently helping to shape this portion of the research. The third and fourth steps are animal and human trials, respectively.
Although confident of the viability of this discovery, Schiller is aware of the difficulty in bringing a new drug or technology to market.
“Only 1 in 500 of these types of applications ever lead to a drug,” he says. “This one could fail along the way. Right now, it’s a promising strategy, and we have some sound indication that it has a chance of working.
“We have the hope that if this is successful with the HIV virus, with adaptations to the system, it could work on almost anything – cancer, immunological diseases, and more. There’s no reason that this strategy can’t become a commonplace treatment for any disease.”
But if advancing a strategy that might cure disease were not enough, Schiller has also managed to develop another completely different form of intellectual property with great commercialization potential.
He has invented a new type of reading accelerator, called xReader, for which the university has filed another patent application.
The purpose of the tool is to make it easier to read complicated documents, including scientific or legal journal articles that contain jargon.
“These types of documents often contain words that are difficult to understand. With this program, as you’re reading, and you don’t know a word, you point to it and a definition pops up along with relevant images.”
This would be useful for myriad circumstances, but particularly valuable for someone who has been recently diagnosed with a disease and wants to learn more about it from actual medical or research journals, Schiller says.
“The xReader will enable you to better understand the jargon in order to make more informed medical decisions.”
Schiller thought of the invention when he was working with the huge amount of bioinformatics data he and his team had collected for their research on genome surgery.
“I was thinking about ways in which we could use the large data warehouse that we built,” he says.
This invention is further along in the commercialization process than the genome surgery discovery, Schiller notes. Earlier this year, the Schiller lab launched Taecan LLC, a new startup company to advance the xReader in the marketplace. It will commercialize the xReader technology, which is in the final stages of review by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Soon, the company will be releasing several new mobile apps and browser plug-ins for personal computers.
