The $5 million in seed funding that Newport Beach-based Beall Family Foundation provided for the University of California-Irvine’s new Institute for Innovation is bearing commercial fruit.
The institute is seen as a particular passion of Don Beall, chairman emeritus of aerospace maker Rockwell who said at the time of the donation 14 months ago that the aim of the new institute was “to bring discoveries to life, benefiting students, faculty, business leaders, the community and society as a whole.”
UC Irvine said the institute was founded as a “single point of contact” for the business community, faculty and students who want to make use of the school’s intellectual property. It offers opportunities for sponsored research, where companies can work with UCI faculty or pay for their services. A push to encourage angel investing as well as business incubation and acceleration is under way.
Then-Provost and now Chancellor Howard Gillman called it “a strategic priority” to ensure cooperation between the school and “a lively entrepreneurial community” locally.
Angel investor and UCI alumnus Richard Sudek—who formerly led Chapman University’s Leatherby Center for Entrepreneurship & Business Ethics—signed on to direct the new institute last July.
The institute’s first fruits range from a small, privately held maker of a new toothpaste to a startup that hopes to make home diagnostic kits for cancer and a publicly traded ingredients developer.
Blueberries
UCI jointly owns patent No. 8,841,350 B2—granted in November by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office—with Irvine-based ChromaDex Corp.
Chromadex participated in and helped pay for the research behind the patent, which covers the use of pterostilbene—a naturally occurring polyphenol in blueberries—for preventing damage to the skin by ultraviolet light.
The company sells proprietary ingredients that go into food, drinks, cosmetics and animal care products.
It traded recently at a market cap of $155 million and had net sales of $15.3 million last year.
ChromaDex controls two other patents on pterostilbene, which is the basis for an ingredient that’s used by various ChromaDex customers in about 40 food and beverage products, according to the company.
ChromaDex Chief Executive Frank Jaksch said a company employee’s conversation with a UCI researcher at a wedding led to the joint effort.
“We planned to work on its skincare potential but hadn’t started yet,” Jaksch said.
The collaboration started under UCI’s Office of Technology Alliances, which now is part of the Institute for Innovation. The project accounted for just one of 81 patents issued to UCI in 2013 and 2014 that was based on the university’s research, according to Ronnie Hanecak, director of the Office of Technology Alliances.
ChromaDex paid UCI $15,000 for its work, the company said, and royalty payments are at least $5,000 a year, according to a regulatory filing.
Tuck-In
UCI chemistry researchers Reginald Penner and Gregory Weiss have done work that could lead to at-home urine tests—similar to over-the-counter pregnancy tests—to detect prostate cancer.
Development-stage healthcare firm PhageTech LLC, which shares space at the EvoNexus business incubator in University Research Park in Irvine, licensed the technology, which uses a microchip to test for disease. Then it asked Penner and Weiss to take a different tack and pursue research for patients with kidney failure or bladder cancer.
PhageTech Chief Executive Richard Henson asked for the new focus—a midproject request that can generate what’s called “tuck-in” research—in hopes of developing a product to serve a bigger market.
The request met a key criterion UCI maintains for companies seeking research, according to Carolyn Stephens, the Institute for Innovation’s strategic marketing director.
“The company brings it in, and the faculty asks, ‘Will this move the science forward?’ ” she said.
PhageTech’s request passed muster.
“The professors knew it was a platform you could run almost any kind of test on,” Henson said. “So we’ve licensed the existing patents, and now they’re going to refine the technology.”
Henson estimated PhageTech could pay $350,000 to $500,000 for UCI’s new research.
“We think we could start a clinical trial by the end of the year,” he said.
UCI’s Beckman Laser Institute helped Los Gatos-based health sciences company Livionex Inc. with a new dental gel.
Petra Wilder-Smith, director of dentistry at the laser institute, said she first told Livionex Chief Executive Amit Goswamy, “I don’t really do toothpaste—I’m more involved in cancer research.”
Potential Overlap
Wilder-Smith was drawn to the potential overlap with her regular work.
“Many people with oral cancers can’t use regular toothpaste” because of chemotherapy, she said, and the Livionex gel’s natural ingredients could address that problem.
On top of that, she said, “I’m always open to a challenge.”
Goswamy, meanwhile, said an activated food preservative in his company’s gel inhibits plaque, and he wanted to see if
high-resolution fluorescent microscopy—
Wilder-Smith’s expertise—would give clear support to the claim.
“Research [brings] credibility, [and] a U.S. university is the gold standard for research,” he said.
Goswamy cited Wilder-Smith’s “rigor and balance” in past work and Beckman’s reputation for imaging.
“You need the photos,” he said. “I wanted objective data.”
UCI did the work in 2013 and published results in two journals last year, bringing a windfall of publicity just as the Institute for Innovation took shape.
“The product worked very well indeed,” Wilder-Smith said, “removing plaque, preventing re-accumulation and [working] quicker” than the toothpaste the study compared it to.
Wilder-Smith said her research team at any one time does research for 10 to 20 companies.
Research has included work for Glidewell Laboratories in Newport Beach and a dental laser maker in Carlsbad.
Livionex paid $20,000 for the work, she said, which covered costs.
“We never make a profit off our studies.”
