University Communications

Fall 2003
Idea factory
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Once a patent is completed and successfully added to UCLA’s portfolio, OIPA pursues licensing — and more inventively and aggressively than ever before. A detailed database helps sort out potential customers, who are contacted individually. A Web site newsletter, “What’s Bruin in the Labs?, ” describes inventions and inventors to an online audience ranging from business-development officers at Fortune 500 companies to venture capitalists and investment bankers.

OIPA staff also maintain ongoing relationships with hundreds of companies and contacts in business and industry. This past summer, OIPA introduced members of the investment community to researchers in fields ranging from nanotechnology to molecular genetics at the First Annual Review of Research.

Still, in spite of all the efforts, “chances are that nobody will notice some of these early inventions for awhile,” Neighbour says. This is simply the nature of university research, he explains, which tends to explore new ideas in their earliest stages of gestation. “Often, nobody quite knows what these ideas are good for,” he says. “It’s going to be several years before anybody wants to take that technology and do something with it.”

Parhami could face an especially long uphill climb because this delay is particularly true in medical therapeutics, where millions of dollars can be spent on research over a period of as long as 15 years to win FDA approval for a new drug or device.

Nevertheless, there are signs that OIPA’s efforts are paying off: The office has seen a significant increase in the number of faculty members reporting new inventions. From an average of 130 inventions per year for the five years preceding OIPA’s reorganization, new-invention disclosures rose to 170 last year and are expected to continue to increase. Also last year, 57 new U.S. patents were filed, 43 new U.S. patents were issued and the number of new licenses executed, 25, was double that of the previous year. In one recent agreement alone, Samsung Electronics licensed nine patents in multimedia communications, patents developed in the Image Communications Laboratory of Engineering Professor John Villaseñor.

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