A group of Texas business executives, including San Antonio billionaire Red McCombs, has invested $27.1 million in a fund initiated Monday to develop new technologies discovered by UT System researchers, said David Lee, president of the Emergent Technologies Fund IV.
Lee said the donated money will be used to pay the UT System licensing fees and to fund research in two local biotechnology companies that employ University researchers, Mimetic Solutions LLC and Beacon Sciences LLC. The fund will be responsible for seeking out new biomedical technologies within the UT System and starting up new companies to develop the technologies for sale on the market, he said.
"We'll license probably eight to 10 technologies to partner companies like Mimetic Solutions," Lee said. "We are now going to campuses across the [UT] System looking for new technologies."
In 2006, the California-based economic think tank Milken Institute ranked the UT System No. 1 globally in the number of biotechnology patents filed. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board reported that UT-Austin netted $8.4 million in patents, royalty rights and licensing in the areas of nanotechnology, biotechnology and clean energy for 2006. The UT Southwestern Medical Center earned $12.3 million in the same year, according to the board.
The UT System ad interim vice chancellor for research and technology transfer, Arjuna Sanga, said once a company is found to purchase the developed technology to market it for sale, the UT System will earn money from its licensing rights with the fund. The UT System has rights to an equity component, a royalty component and a sub-licence component with the fund, he said.
The two companies, partners of Austin-based enterprise Emergent Technologies Inc., work with two University researchers, biomedical engineering professor Nikolaos Peppas and chemistry and biochemistry professor Eric Anslyn, Sanga said.
"Those scientists, through the course of their research, come across new inventions," he said. "What the University does is license its rights for that intellectual property. Money flows back to the University in the form of royalties."
Anslyn works with Beacon Sciences developing synthetic molecules that recognize and bind with target molecules in the body, said Brian Windsor, senior vice managing director for Emergent Technologies and an executive with both Beacon Sciences and Mimetic Solutions.
"The technology is sort of a lock-and-key chemistry that can be used to detect chemical compounds," Windsor said. "If the chemical is detected, the solution begins to glow."
Windsor said Peppas performs research for Mimetic Solutions and engineered a synthetic polymer called an Affinimer that can be specially tailored to bind to different types of molecules.
"They can build a polymer system that recognizes a molecule, say glucose in your body," he said. "It can affect or cause a release in a drug or a chemical agent."
For example, this technology could be used to release a drug in a diabetic patient in the presence of glucose, Windsor said.
Emergent Technologies has three other funds, two that develop technologies within the University of Oklahoma and one within the west Texas area and Texas Tech University, Windsor said.
Anslyn and Peppas were not available for comment Monday.
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