business backgrounder | economy
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pacific northwest national laboratory: bringing ideas to market employs more than
4,300 people helped create nearly
100 companies signed with companies
840 licenses
“ I’ m a capitalist,” she says with a chuckle.“ I see an enormous opportunity of phenomenal inventions sitting on a shelf. So, I’ d like to create a catalyst to extract as much as possible out of that opportunity.”
Why not, then, she thought, focus on the federal inventions, which, after all, were developed with taxpayer money. Truman came up with the start-up challenge approach in collaboration with her colleague and friend from the National Cancer Institute, Tom Stackhouse: Match teams of serial entrepreneurs and students with patented inventions, provide them with business coaching, and push them to create an entrepreneurial plan in a competitive environment.
The first contest, the 2014 Breast Cancer Start-Up Challenge( held in partnership with the Avon Foundation and the National Cancer Institute), yielded 10 winners. Start-up challenges with the National Institutes of Health and NASA followed. In all, 80 companies were launched.
One success story is Oncolinx, a Boston company that not only was among the winners of the Breast Cancer Start-Up Challenge, but went on to win other competitions and awards, as well. Working with pharmaceutical companies to develop antibody drug conjugates, CEO Sourav Sinha expects Oncolinx to enter clinical trials in 2017.
Sinha credits Truman and the Breast Cancer Start-Up Challenge with setting his company on the path to its goal— bringing new therapies to cancer patients.
“ The CAI and Rosemarie had everything to do with it,” he says.“ It was her idea to send out the best technologies from the National Cancer Institute. It’ s a great example of how what she envisioned, in terms of the types of technology, can be accelerated for the people they can help the most.”
The challenge model lends itself to the Department of Energy labs, both Truman and Young agreed. PNNL could be the first platform, potentially replicated across all the federal labs. Imagine, Truman says, a start-up challenge that draws upon inventions from throughout the lab system, with a goal of creating 100 new companies.
“ The federal government has never done anything like this. There’ s a lot of very good pieces here, but if we can galvanize the current efforts that are going on, put all the components into a platform and turn them into a significant effort, it’ s like we’ re putting layers of muscle on a skeleton and making it move.
“ That would be the biggest impact I could have.”
While the emphasis on commercialization may be new for the U. S. Department of Energy— it opened an Office of Technology Transitions in 2015— the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has had numerous business successes over the years.
One of those is UniEnergy Technologies( UET) in Mukilteo, founded in 2012 by former PNNL Fellow Gary Yang and Lead Scientist Liyu Li. After Battelle licensed the new-generation vanadium flow battery technology invented at PNNL, UET has commercialized and improved the technology into gridscale systems that store large amounts of energy, including renewables, and uses that power to supply and support the electricity grid. In Washington, projects by Avista Utilities and the Snohomish County Public Utility District use UET’ s containerized flow batteries; others have been deployed, or are in the process of deployment, in California, Hawaii, New York, Tennessee, Germany and Italy.
It’ s just one of many lab-to-market inventions generated at the Richland-based PNNL, which has been operated by Battelle since it opened in 1965. Today, PNNL employs more than 4,300 people, helped create nearly 100 companies and has signed some 840 licenses with companies and organizations.
PNNL’ s commercialization work is critical, explains Russ Weed, UET’ s vice president of business development and marketing and general counsel. Though UET had Yang and Li behind it, PNNL, as a whole, was instrumental in helping nurture the vanadium flow battery invention and offer it to the market.
“ Commercialization provides the voice of the market to the technology side,” Weed said.“ Having a clear vision of which technologies will grow and which ones won’ t make it is an art, not a science. Judgment is important.”
And with the hire of Rosemarie Truman as director of innovation impact, PNNL hopes to leverage even more of its intellectual property, said Malin Young, the lab’ s deputy director for science and technology.
“ With the Department of Energy’ s increased focus, her job is evolving. But it’ s been part of our mission for decades to work with private industry to license technologies,” she said.“ We feel that there are a lot more opportunities for people within the lab system, to engage with the Department and with private industry in lots of ways.”— Kim Eckart
52 association of washington business