Across the College of Science, 18 patents are currently pending as utility patent applications; 8 have been filed as provisional patent applications and 17 have been issued and remained active since 1995.
Shahriar Mobashery, the Navari Family Chair in Life Sciences, has filed two patents on novel antibiotics within the last year. Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Paul Helquist was issued two patents relating to orphan drugs. Prashant Kamat, senior scientist at the Radiation Laboratory, has a patent pending on boosting the efficiency of solar cells through single-wall carbon nanotube scaffolds, and Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Marvin Miller has three provisional patents and four issued patents for technology in the area of fighting tuberculosis, cancer and multi-drug resistant bacteria.
The office of Technology Transfer at the University of Notre Dame provides guidance in commercializing these inventions and numerous others. When the University elects to pursue a patent, it bares the cost of pursuing the patent, owns the rights to the patentable invention and shares the invention revenue with the faculty member.
Discovering the PiggyBac Transposon
A transposon discovered more than a decade ago by Malcom Fraser, professor of biological sciences, who named the jumping gene piggyBac, is proving broadly useful for genetic engineering of a variety of organisms. Fraser has four patents issued and two on file. He began his work with baculoviruses in the early 1980s and identified piggyBac first in the cabbage looper moth.
Transposons are segments of DNA that can move around within an organism (hence the nickname “jumping”) and cause mutations. That mobility and their ability to carry other genetic material make them useful for introducing new material into target organisms. Their viral behavior makes the introduction rapid and widespread. The piggyBac transposon, unlike most other transposons, is not limited to movement within its own host species but can move in the genomes of other eukaryote organisms.
Some 10 years ago Fraser and his collaborators successfully used piggyBac to perform a genetic transformation of an insect, the Mediterranean Fruit Fly, for the first time. The study showed that the change was maintained through 15 generations. Since then, many other insects have been genetically engineered using piggyBac. In 2005, researchers in China used the transposon successfully in manipulating the genome of mice and showed that it can insert itself into the human genome. Fraser says applications could range from synthetic silk fibers, to human therapeutic proteins, vaccines and engineered non-embryonic human stem cells. He says, “We believe that these properties can be exploited for an even broader range of invertebrate and vertebrate species, and are excited that this element has found increasing utility in applied transgenic studies.”
Developing a Patent on a Prostate Cancer Vaccine
Director of the Freimann Life Sciences Center, Mark Suckow has six patent applications pending related to vaccines and expects the first to be approved by the end of this year. The approval process takes four to five years. All of the intellectual property has been licensed from Notre Dame by a medium-sized company that already has products on the market. “The company’s goal is to commercialize at least some of the technology derived from Suckow’s laboratory. They are especially excited about the vaccine adjuvant technology,” Suckow said.
Suckow, who has been researching vaccines for some 20 years, was focused on infectious diseases before he came to Notre Dame 10 years ago and started working with a prostate cancer model developed by internationally recognized prostate cancer researcher Morris Pollard, director of the Lobund Institute. He focuses on two main technologies – one related to cancer vaccines and one with vaccine adjuvants, substances used to help make vaccines work even better. The patent applications involve nuances of each technology.
His approach with cancer is to develop a vaccine that uses targets expressed directly in tumors rather than from cultured cells. “My approach has a huge menu of such targets, compared to other vaccines which have greatly fewer,” Suckow says. The vaccine has been shown in animal models to help prevent prostate cancer, with a 90 percent reduction in incidence, and to treat prostate cancer, with a 20 percent cure rate and 70 percent reduction in the number of individuals having metastasis.
Using a Mathematical Method to Predict Breast Cancer Recurrence
Patients diagnosed with breast cancer are normally treated with surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy and possibly hormone therapy, although many will not relapse even without chemotherapy.
Professor of Mathematics and associate dean for undergraduate studies Steven Buechler has developed a way to predict the recurrence of breast cancer using network theory and microarray data. A provisional patent on the method has been filed. The tool, taking advantage of research into the molecular biology of cancer cells, can guide individual treatment plans, perhaps avoiding chemotherapy when it provides little benefit.
Buechler’s work provides a new way of selecting genes for a test that predicts the recurrence rate of breast cancer. His approach is more stable and more accurate than previous methods. It uses the expression level of only four genes to predict relapse or define disease subtypes, making more targeted treatment possible. The method, which can be applied to all estrogen receptor positive tumors, has been validated in six independent datasets with different clinical traits and technical formats.
The method can also be applied to other types of cancer and may spare many patients from expensive, unnecessary chemotherapy and its associated side effects.
