A Virtuous Cycle

The products highlighted below represent a virtuous cycle of activity. Under successful circumstances, a series of returns on government-funded investment are given back to society in the form of life-saving or life-prolonging drugs and other products that enhance people’s quality of life. It is also returned by economic development in terms of gross domestic product, taxes, and the creation of new jobs. 

Since the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980—which granted universities rights to intellectual property developed with government funding—academic technology transfer has spurred overall economic growth by spawning new businesses, creating new industries, and opening new markets.

The results have been significant for Columbia as well. Revenues from successful products have flowed back to the University, not only to the inventors and researchers, but also to central funds, allowing Columbia to carry out discretionary projects such as the creation of new multidisciplinary research centers and the infrastructure to support them. A pertinent example is the prestigious Department of Biomedical Engineering, which was initiated using technology transfer funds. With the University reinvesting its earnings into research that furthers technological, scientific, and social advances, innovation at Columbia will continue to impact society at large.

MPEG-2

This groundbreaking research, conducted by a team that included Dimitris Anastassiou, Columbia University professor of electrical engineering, allows the transmission of high-quality video and audio over limited bandwidth. Columbia was the only academic institution involved in the development of the MPEG-2, which uses mathematical manipulations to compress a video signal to send it and decompress it to show it. MPEG-2, which appears in all current forms of digital transmission, has become the international television-coding standard. The success of getting this technology from laboratory to marketplace was the result of the University’s collaboration with key industry partners including Fujitsu, General Instruments, Mitsubishi, Philips Electronics, and Sony Corp. The technology, which represents a market of billions of dollars, is currently being used in high definition television (HDTV), DVD disks, video on demand (VOD), and personal computing. It will be used in all PCs and TVs of the future—products that will boast larger screens that depict tremendous details.

Cotransformation: helping pharmaceutical companies to manufacture products

This scientific work, carried out by Columbia’s Nobel Prize–winning scientist Richard Axel and two colleagues, involves methods of inserting genes into the DNA of a cell. The discovery—known as cotransformation—has made it possible to turn cells into factories capable of producing a specific protein, allowing pharmaceutical companies to use human proteins rather than chemicals as the basis of drugs. Columbia has licensed these methods to more than 30 companies. Many products that rely on Dr. Axel’s work, including Biogen Idec’s Avonex for treatment for multiple sclerosis and Genzyme Corp.’s Cerezyme for Gaucher’s disease, have yielded billions of dollars in sales and vastly improved the quality of hundreds of thousands of lives.

Latanoprost: a revolutionary glaucoma treatment

Groundbreaking research conducted by Columbia University Professor Laszlo Z. Bito revealed that prostaglandins, a family of chemicals produced by the body, when given in extremely small does, can lower ocular pressure— and thereby successfully treat glaucoma, a disease that plagues two million Americans with vision loss and causes 120,000 to go blind annually. Dr. Bito’s discovery led to the development of a synthetic version of the prostaglandins, Latanoprost, which Pharmacia Corp. (now Pfizer) bought the rights to and used to create the drug Xalatan—now the number one treatment for glaucoma.

Chimeric antibodies: a key ingredient for better-tolerated drugs

This technique, developed by former Columbia Professor S. L. Morrison, offers a technique for making “chimeric” antibodies—molecules with mouse and human components—that are better tolerated by the human immune system. The discovery has been licensed by numerous pharmaceutical companies and developed into many life-saving products such as Centocor’s anti-bloodclotting drug ReoPro, one of the first successful antibody medicines. The technique has also proven effective at developing several successful therapies for rheumatoid arthritis patients.