Contents
- Science Advances
From Discovery to Market
Science Advances
From Discovery to Market
Collaborating with a Company
Reeder and colleagues took advantage of a collaborative research agreement established between Stanford University and General Electric (GE) to create a prototype of the algorithm that could be used with GE’s MRI machines. (See “Agreements with Industry.”) “When we have a new technology that may have broad applications, we work very closely with GE,” says Brian Hargreaves, an assistant professor of radiology at CAMRT. “One of their strengths is making technologies work more reliably and efficiently so that any researcher can use them.”
Today the technology that Reeder and colleagues at CAMRT developed with GE, dubbed IDEAL [ * ], is being used by the Stanford group for a variety of applications, including to distinguish silicone from breast tissue; to image fatty tumors; and to suppress fat signals and improve imaging in the ankle, head, and neck.
And within a year, researchers and clinicians across the country will benefit from IDEAL technology as it becomes available as an easy-to-use option on many of GE’s commercially available MRI devices. “It has taken a lot of communication between the groups to make IDEAL happen,” says Reeder. “But the pace of development has been fantastic.”
Reeder, who joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Radiology in 2005 as division chief of MRI, notes one key reason IDEAL will come so quickly to market was the research agreement in place with GE. “It is extremely important for an academic site to establish a comprehensive research framework with a collaborating company,” he says. “The agreement needs to define intellectual property and other important principles that facilitate cooperation and ensure open communication.”
* Iterative Decomposition of Water and Fat with Echo Asymmetry and Least-Squares Estimation
AGREEMENTS WITH INDUSTRY
When academic scientists collaborate with industry, both parties draw up legal agreements that detail responsibilities for the work, ownership of intellectual property, communication of results, and other issues. Master Agreements, also referred to as “blanket” or “umbrella” agreements, are used when a company expects to sponsor multiple projects with an academic institution over a long period of time. In such cases, the legal terms and conditions are pre-negotiated. When a new project is proposed, the terms of the Master Agreement are incorporated by reference into the new agreement, considerably speeding up the negotiation process. Stanford University, home to the NCRR-funded Center for Advanced Magnetic Resonance Technology, has a Master Agreement for sponsored research with several companies, including General Electric.
Measuring Oxygen
Enrico Gratton, head of the NCRR-funded Laboratory of Fluorescence Dynamics (LFD) at the University of California, Irvine, took a different track in bringing his discoveries to market. In 1984, Gratton founded the company ISS Inc. in Champaign, Ill., to make some of LFD’s technologies commercially available.
One such technology, which has a broad range of applications in the clinic, grew out of a curious finding by the University of Pennsylvania’s Britton Chance, a renowned expert in the field of optical imaging and a friend of Gratton.
In 1988, Chance’s group was working with near-infrared lasers to understand how different tissues responded to laser light. Chance discovered that the light took a fair amount of time to pass through the brains of the graduate students in the lab, but it passed through very rapidly when the laser was pointed at his own head.
Chance was concerned that he might be witnessing the effects of aging on his brain. But Gratton had an insight: Brain activity results in an increase in blood flow and of oxygenated hemoglobin. Gratton realized that differences in the speed at which laser light traveled through the brain could be caused by changes in oxygenation. Further testing revealed that near-infrared lasers could be used to precisely quantify oxygen amounts in various tissues.
The finding put to rest Chance’s worries and led to technological innovation. “Here we were helping a friend, and suddenly we have made a discovery that put us very far ahead in our field of research,” says Gratton. “We could measure oxygenation of tissues in a quantitative way.”
