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CREDIT: NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION, SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING INDICATORS 2012 faculty, students, and companies.” Students, he adds, “are basically your principal tech transfer asset; they transfer skills and enterprise to the community.” That philosophy has helped shape an array of institutional arrangements at UMD, including events intended to maximize interactions with potential industry partners. Along with a traditional patenting and licensing operation and “incubators” where entrepreneurial faculty members and students can nurture their startups, there’s also a growing undergraduate entrepreneurship program and informal mixers with business leaders and local venture capitalists. The school’s Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech) also hosts regular entrepreneur hours where anyone can get advice from experts on commercializing their ideas regardless of their relationship to the university. At one gathering last year, for instance, two UMD geneticists wondered if they could sell information about equine DNA to racehorse breeders, while a local businessman described trying to commercialize a patented recipe for converting discarded crab shells into a valuable biochemical. “We’re interested in creating connections in the broader community, not just on campus,” says Dean Chang, a former computer science entrepreneur who now helps lead UMD’s innovation programs. Those connections are in line with the university’s mission to help develop the local and national economy, Chang and other college offi cials say. UMD’s approach is consistent with research showing that “innovation requires an ecosystem and experience, not just an offi ce,” says Lesa Mitchell, a vice president of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri, which has funded extensive studies of commercialization. “You want a rich mixing bowl where people are running into each other in all kinds of settings.” Large urban campuses with diverse, well-developed economies often have an edge, she adds, because cities can provide a critical mix of skilled talent, infl uential contacts, and investment capital. Many universities are also experimenting with ways to cut the red tape surrounding IP. One approach is to offer potential partners standardized online legal agreements executed with the click of a mouse. Other institutions are going further, allowing professors and students to found startups without a license from the university. Todd Sherer, the president of AUTM and head of the technology transfer offi ce at Emory University in Atlanta, says schools taking that approach are essentially saying: “Don’t worry too much about charging for this technology now; we’ll get it back in donations later if the company succeeds.” Economist Marie Thursby of Georgia Tech, who has spent decades studying tech transfer, likes those approaches. “Inventions shouldn’t get tied up just so the university can get its cut,” she asserts. NEWSFOCUS Making an impact In Egypt, Ellaithy has tried to draw on such advice as he builds a tech transfer offi ce at his nearly century-old university. Although relatively small, AUC is known as one of the country’s best. Roughly one-third of its approximately 5500 undergraduates and 1500 graduate students study science and engineering, and the university recently launched its fi rst doctoral programs, starting with technical fi elds. But research spending is sparse by U.S. and European standards, representing only 5% of the university’s $180 million operating budget. And AUC professors often aren’t eligible for government funding because of national policies favoring public institutions. “We’re used to being creative and fending for ourselves,” he says. That creativity got a new outlet in 2002 when the Egyptian government rewrote intellectual property laws to make it easier for universities to take ownership of ideas developed by their scholars. In 2009, AUC and three other Egyptian universities won a grant from the European Union to set up academic commercialization offi ces and hired Ellaithy to lead the effort. He says he spent much of his first year “looking for approaches that might work for us.” In the end, AUC leaders opted for a version of what some call an “impact first, income later” strategy. They hope tech transfer will become a platform for building relationships with industry that might lead to collaborative research funding, jobs for graduates, and other, more personal forms of transferring technology. In the short run, new companies and licensing revenue would be icing on the cake, Ellaithy says. One of Ellaithy’s fi rst jobs was to persuade faculty members to reveal their discoveries so his offi ce can vet them for possible IP protection. Faculty members around the world are often reluctant to make such “disclosures,” and Ellaithy notes that entrepreneurial academics in Egypt have traditionally felt entitled to own and commercialize their work. At AUC, however, he has been pleasantly surprised by the faculty’s response. Since the 2.5-person offi ce formally opened in 2010, it has prepared a dozen patent applications and is in the process of standing up its fi rst startup company, which is developing a quick diagnostic tool for hepatitis C invented by AUC chemist Hassan Azzazy. Ellaithy is also drafting new confl ict of interest rules in a bid to head off problems. “We’re sort of swamped,” he admits. Despite these early achievements, Ellaithy knows that tech transfer is a marathon—and that success isn’t measured solely by monetary gains. “We might shoot ourselves in the foot if we do really well with licensing one year,” he says. “People could come to expect that’s the way it is always going to be.” –DAVID MALAKOFF Intellectual property. Academic discoveries related to biotechnology and new drugs have been the top sources of patents won by U.S. universities in recent years. www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 339 15 FEBRUARY 2013 753 Published by AAAS on February 14, 2013 www.sciencemag.org Downloaded from
754 PHYSIOLOGY Opsins: Not Just for Eyes Studies in invertebrates are enriching our sense of how versatile and ancient these light-sensitive proteins are When researchers got their fi rst glimpse of the sea urchin genome in 2006, they were surprised to fi nd genes for opsins, light-sensitive proteins without which vision as we know it today would be impossible. Living in the subtidal zones, sea urchins are not only eyeless, but also headless, and, ostensibly brainless. They seemed to lack the specialized photoreceptor cells that house opsins in the eyes of other animals. “Nobody knew what [the opsins] were for,” recalls Maria Ina Arnone, a developmental biologist who has long studied sea urchins at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples, Italy, one of the world’s oldest marine labs. Arnone’s preliminary analyses suggested an opsin gene was active at the base of the tube feet, the tiny projections located in and around urchin spines. And in 2011, her group showed that these tube feet were loaded with photoreceptor cells that had been missed because they lack pigment typically associated with opsins. That work and other recent studies have driven home the fact that a wide variety of organisms don’t need traditional eyes to make use of opsins, and that opsins can likely sense more than light. Last month, at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) in San Francisco, Arnone and other researchers revealed the rich history and unexpectedly broad utility of these proteins. In fruit fl ies, for example, they may be involved in hearing. “Opsins can be expressed in many more tissues than the simple eye,” Arnone says. Beyond eyes Hints that opsins existed outside the eye started dribbling in almost 25 years ago, with suggestions that fish skin and dove brains contained the molecules. Among the first to pin down an extraocular opsin protein were Ignacio Provencio and Mark Rollag at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, and their colleagues. They knew that pigment cells in amphibian skin reacted to light and eventually isolated an opsin in frog skin that they named melanopsin in 1998. Until then, researchers thought there was one kind of opsin in vertebrates, called ciliary opsin, and another, more ancient kind, rhabdomeric opsin, in invertebrates. But though melan- 15 FEBRUARY 2013 VOL 339 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org Published by AAAS opsin was found in a frog, it looked more like the invertebrate opsin. Provencio and Rollag also found melanopsin in the frog eye and brain and over the next few years, a fl urry of papers teased out which other vertebrates possess the protein and provided clues to melanopsin’s function. Researchers have found it in mouse and human neural tissue, for example, and in some animals, it helps establish circadian rhythms (Science, 20 December 2002, p. 2297). Melanopsin hinted at an underappreciated complexity of opsins. And a 2003 survey of opsins throughout the animal kingdom by Detlev Arendt from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, drove home that both rhabdomeric and ciliary opsins are ancient and that the invertebrate/ vertebrate divide for these types doesn’t hold up. But the search for opsins in animals other than vertebrates and insects and in places other than eyes didn’t really take off until recent advances in DNA sequencing made it possible to probe the genomes of a wide variety of organisms, such as the sea urchin. Arnone has slowly homed in on how opsins help this simple creature use light and “see.” These spiny echinoderms tend to avoid direct sunshine. Some will cover themselves with debris; others move under rocks in search of shadow. Researchers have shown some that sea urchins can even distinguish different shaped objects. Last month at the SICB meeting, Arnone proposed that the opsin photoreceptor cells in the sea urchin are positioned at the base of the tube feet such that they lie partially in the shadow of its calcite skeleton, Online sciencemag.org Podcast interview with author Elizabeth Pennisi (http://scim.ag/ pod_6121). Light sensors. Opsin-laden photoreceptor cells (green, red) provide juvenile sea urchins a means to detect light. allowing the skeleton to serve the same purpose as pigment in typical eyes—most opsins co-occur with pigment, which shields part of a photoreceptor cell so it can register the direction of incoming light. She has also shown that the photoreceptor cells connect to the fi ve radial nerves in the brainless urchin, which may enable the input from the different photoreceptor cells to be compiled, much like an insect’s compound eye does. In echinoderms, the opsin story is complex. The opsin at the base of the tube feet CREDIT: MARIA INA ARNONE/STAZIONE ZOOLOGICA ANTON DOHRN on February 14, 2013 www.sciencemag.org Downloaded from
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