Putting Discoveries to Work

One of the easiest ways to envision the George Mason University technology transfer process—that is, the route an idea takes to become a product—is to talk about Gatorade. It’s one of the most famous examples of university tech transfer.

In 1965, a University of Florida football coach met with scientists from the university’s College of Medicine to determine why many of the university athletes were negatively affected by heat. James Robert Cade, MD, and his team of researchers created the now-ubiquitous sports drink to help athletes replace bodily fluids lost during practices and games. The product was named for the team—the Gators.

That early version of the drink wasn't a hit with football players, and it took a multitude of steps to move the drink from prototype to supermarket shelves. But the drink’s formula improved and its popularity grew. By 2015, royalties for those inventors hit $1 billion—and gave other universities something to aspire to.

Not every invention takes off in such a lucrative way, but the goal of all these university-born innovations is the same—to improve people’s lives.

“George Mason is in the business of discovery,” says Andre Marshall, vice president for research, innovation, and economic impact at George Mason. “We want to get our good ideas out of the laboratory and put to good use.” 

Right now, George Mason researchers are working on better diagnostics for Lyme disease, developing a bruise detection system that can be used by clinicians across all skin tones, and creating a decision tool to help U.S. farmers achieve better crop yields, just to name a few.

The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Congress, and philanthropists are among those who support this important work.

Paula Sorrell, George Mason’s associate vice president of innovation and economic impact, says the university’s competitive advantage lies in the fact that it houses tech transfer under the same umbrella as entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic development. These units are all part of Mason Enterprise.

“This allows us to leverage our capacity to provide counseling and education from 23 other programs and strategically plan how technologies will positively impact society and Virginia’s economy,” says Sorrell, who leads Mason Enterprise. “Because our tech transfer office is staffed with an exceptional group of experienced business and technology professionals, we are able to balance the needs of internal and external stakeholders to move products to the market.”

 

The Business of Discovery

At George Mason, the Office of Technology Transfer (OTT), led by David Grossman, senior director of technology transfer and industry collaboration, helps researchers bring these ideas and discoveries from the laboratory to the marketplace.

“The Office of Technology Transfer takes great pride in the quality of patented innovations brought forth by our dedicated researchers,” says Grossman. “This collaboration between academia and industry underscores our unwavering commitment to harness the full potential of research for the betterment of society.”

Long before industry becomes involved, Grossman and his team at OTT are there to help researchers protect their intellectual property (IP). All inventions begin with an innovation disclosure, which is a brief summary of the work.

“I say innovation versus invention, because sometimes it's not actually a patentable thing,” says Grossman, who is also a lawyer and has taught patent law. “Sometimes it is a copyright or something else.”

Following the disclosure, the OTT team will meet with the researchers. They try to discern if there is protectable IP, what the necessary steps are to secure that IP, and if there is a pathway to the public.

“Our goal is always to make sure that the results of the research benefit the public somehow,” he says.

 

Patents Pending and Industry Partners

Being an inventor requires a lot of patience. It can take years to secure a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. To date, George Mason researchers have acquired 296 patents.

Grossman says the number of innovation disclosures by university faculty members continues to grow but not all these innovations will go through the patent process. As he and the OTT staff work with faculty members to safeguard their IPs, they handle all the patent, trademark, and copyright filings.

Grossman says that new innovations are not usually in a position where they can go directly into the marketplace. So the next step in the tech transfer process often involves partnering with a company in that field and licensing the technology. The OTT team helps forge these partnerships and negotiate licensing agreements. Sometimes start-up companies are created to advance the innovation.

One of the most successful university partnerships of this kind is with Ceres Nanosciences, a Northern Virginia bioscience company spun out of George Mason that specializes in diagnostic products and workflows. Ceres and George Mason have worked together since the company’s inception, and Ceres’s first lab was on George Mason’s Science and Technology Campus.

Ceres now has space nearby in Prince William County’s Innovation Park where it has increased its capacity to manufacture Nanotrap Magnetic Virus Particles. The base technology underlying the Nanotrap particle was created by George Mason’s Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine (CAPMM), which is led by codirectors Lance Liotta and Emanuel Petricoin.

These particles improve diagnostic testing for viruses like COVID-19, influenza, and Lyme disease, and this university–industry collaboration was critical to George Mason’s response during the pandemic.

Using a Nanotrap test, CAPMM scientists oversaw George Mason’s surveillance testing, administering more than 155,000 COVID tests to students, faculty, and staff and processing those tests in university labs with results within 24 to 48 hours. The easy access to testing and fast turnaround time meant that those testing positive were quickly identified and isolated, which helped mitigate outbreaks within the campus community.

“It was very fortunate that we had put a lot of energy into developing the technology for viral infections and released a product for it before the pandemic,” says Ceres CEO Ross Dunlap, who serves on the George Mason Research Foundation board. “We were able to rapidly respond and quickly validate our technology for COVID diagnostics, which was done in partnership with George Mason.”

 

Shared Resources

Some innovations like the NeuroMorpho database are a shared resource available to researchers around the world.

George Mason neuroscientist Giorgio Ascoli created NeuroMorpho.org in 2006 to store the large amounts of data needed to make computational models of neurons. The open-access database of 3D neural reconstructions has grown from 932 reconstructions to more than 180,000, and it is continuously updated with contributions from more than 1,000 labs worldwide.

The reconstructions have been used to investigate Alzheimer’s disease pathways, epilepsy, memory capacity, and the effects of cosmic radiation on astronauts’ central nervous systems.

Ascoli, founding director of the Center for Neural Informatics, Structures, and Plasticity at George Mason, believes this database could pave the way for future breakthroughs, such as new treatments for neurological diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. “I'm a firm believer that in time NeuroMorpho.org will help advance humanity toward a fuller characterization of the mind-matter relationship, and that's something to live for,” he says.

Sometimes the innovation is meant to make the research itself a little easier. Two technologies that came out of George Mason’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media were designed by historians to make humanities research easier to document and share.

Many college students recognize the name Zotero, which is a free, easy-to-use tool designed to help people collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research.

Since its release in 2008, Omeka has established itself as a leading open source web publishing platform for digital collections. The software has been downloaded more than 500,000 times and is the content management system for thousands of websites developed by libraries, archives, museums, and scholars.

As the head of George Mason’s research enterprise, Marshall believes it’s the university’s responsibility as a Carnegie Research 1 university to pursue this work and these collaborations.

“This work is ambitious,” says Marshall, “especially when you're trying to bridge the culture between industry, university, and government. And when you add in doing this inclusively and while prioritizing access, it truly is what makes Mason All Together Different.”

 

Martha Bushong, Mary Cunningham, John Hollis, Katie Maney, Tracy Mason, and Laura Powers contributed to this article.