Researchers at the University of Auckland have developed a novel treatment for Rett syndrome, a severe neurological disorder affecting hundreds of thousands of girls and women around the world. continue reading »

Louisiana State University (LSU) is teaming up with regional economic development organization Baton Rouge Area Chamber (BRAC), start-up accelerator group NexusLA and New Orleans nonprofit The Idea Village to launch a new 10-week program to help entrepreneurs turn their ideas into scalable companies.

Start-up City Launch will provide educational courses, mentorship, networking opportunities, and other crucial resources for start-up creation. It builds upon the Idea Village’s accelerator program, IDEAinstitute, which has served over 300 start-up founders in the last four years.

“The IDEAinstitute training complements LSU’s efforts in innovation and technology commercialization,” says Andrew J. Maas, associate vice president for research in the LSU Office of Innovation & Ecosystem Development. “We are excited to partner with The Idea Village to build in Baton Rouge and for the Start-up City Launch program and look forward to offering even more resources to entrepreneurs in the Capital region.”

Chris Spalatin, manager of small business services at BRAC, comments, “Start-up City Launch is a natural progression of the collaborative business ecosystem we are elevating within the Baton Rouge area, alongside our partners NexusLA and LSU Innovation. This will build on our region’s small business offerings, allowing innovative entrepreneurs the opportunity to grow their start-ups into scalable ventures.”

Jon Atkinson, CEO of the Idea Village, adds, “This local collaboration will help empower and connect the wealth of talent in our region to the opportunity to make their promising ideas a reality.”

Source: LSU Media Center

The UK government has recruited two leading university and investor experts to identify best practice in the commercialization of university technologies. continue reading »

The Technology Transfer Book of Best Practices is a 729-page resource that’s chock-full of how-to strategies and case studies covering the most critical challenges facing tech transfer professionals. This comprehensive collection offers a cost-effective way to zero in on proven best practices in every key area impacting your TTO and boost your program’s results with critical success strategies implemented by the world’s top TTOs.

Available in both print and electronic download, The Technology Transfer Book of Best Practices is packed with over 190 detailed articles filled with tips, tactics, ideas, expert guidance, and nuts-and-bolts solutions for TTOs. For details including a complete table of contents or to order, click here.

A start-up from Arizona State University (ASU) aims to improve the process of anaerobic digestion to produce more methane for sustainable fuels and other products. continue reading »

Santa Clara University (SCU) is running a program that enables law and business students to collaborate on advising start-up entrepreneurs. continue reading »

A Rice University spinout has raised $3 million in seed funding to commercialize a process for turning captured carbon into sustainable materials. continue reading »

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have developed a breathing device to aid people suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). continue reading »

A start-up from the University of Toronto (U of T) is using highly engineered bacteria to turn food waste into biodegradable materials for products ranging from T-shirt fibers to flip-flop soles. continue reading »

A detailed article on Bina, the Weizmann Institute of Science’s new unit devoted to identifying very early stage research with potential for translation, appears in the February issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the complete article, or for further subscription details, click here.

The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, is one of the world’s leading multidisciplinary research institutions with a long and successful history of technology transfer.

But institute leaders there also saw a weak spot in their efforts — a need for more focus on nurturing early research that might have potential applications but is not yet on the TTO’s radar. To address this gap, the institute launched an entirely new unit, separate from the TTO, that delves deep into research labs to find and cultivate those early projects as a precursor to any tech transfer activity.

The new unit is called Bina (Bridge. Innovate. Nurture. Advance) — which is Hebrew for wisdom — and works to identify early-stage ideas and technologies and their possible applications. But it does so at a point earlier — a pre-translational stage — to discover and bring forward more potentially valuable innovations that haven’t yet made it into the commercialization pipeline. This is done through a variety of methods that include researcher education, mentoring programs, and networking activities.

Bina is the brainchild of Professor Irit Sagi, vice president of innovation and technology transfer.

When she accepted the position in 2020, she discovered a pattern that was a little disturbing. The same group of scientists were sending disclosures to Yeda Research and Development Company Ltd. (Weizmann’s TTO) over and over again, but there weren’t many submissions from anyone else. Where were the new faces? She quickly learned that more awareness about how to get a technology to market was needed to encourage a fresh stream of applicants.

“There was a gap between what was actually happening in the labs and the commercial arm of the Institute,” she says. “We needed to bridge it.” 

Simply put, Bina is described as being “responsible for the scientific nurturing of projects,” while Yeda is “the entity which is responsible for the commercial pursuit of Weizmann projects.”

Bina is not a TTO; it’s a scientific unit administered internally by the Vice President for Innovation and Technology Transfer. As such, Bina identifies and funds basic research projects in the very early stages of development and assists researchers in nurturing and supporting these potential innovations through dedicated mentoring programs.

It’s an in-house innovation hub of sorts. It operates several programs that raise awareness throughout Weizmann Institute research labs, synergize new ideas, and assist scientists in developing their early-stage discoveries and ideas into potentially beneficial new technologies. But the big difference between Bina and more typical TTO activity is that it focuses earlier in a project, well before any talk of patent registration or commercialization.

Prior to Bina, scientists who had an initial conversation with the TTO would return to their labs or respective think tanks to complete their research on their own. Today, Bina pre-empts that initial conversation and helps them to figure out their next steps on how to pursue a path to translation.

Dr. Sharon Fireman, PhD, who leads Bina, says that guidance is available to all Weizmann Institute scientists. All they need to do is fill out a short application form which can be found on

Bina’s website. The brief form asks for basic information — contact information, project description, potential application, preliminary results, plans for publication. Once an application is received, a joint Bina-Yeda team reviews it to determine the project status. Advanced projects are referred to Yeda for IP protection and potential licensing, whereas early-stage projects are referred to Bina.

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