The Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) identifies technologies developed at City of Hope with potential for commercial application. Once such technologies are identified, the office works with inventors to help them understand the patent process and negotiates agreements with prospective partners to commercialize the relevant intellectual property.
OTL helps launch exciting new companies based on research conducted at City of Hope. We are glad to provide appropriate documentation to parties expressing interest in development and commercialization of available technologies.
Recent Technology Developments and Licensing Agreements
City of Hope has developed an impressive variety of new technologies that are now coming to fruition, many of which are rapidly being licensed by biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and/or funded by venture capital firms. These include:
– City of Hope has developed novel synthetic peptides that reverse the effects of amyloid β protein implicated in Alzheimer’s disease development.
– City of Hope and its partner IDT have developed Dicer-Substrate short interfering RNA (siRNA) technology - siRNA molecules of greater than 25 base pairs that combine optimized chemistry with overhangs that direct the processing of the RNA molecule within Dicer RNases for improved strand hand-off to the RISC complex. Dicer Substrates can have dramatically improved potency compared to conventional, first-generation RNAi technology.
– City of Hope has licensed intellectual property related to a chimeric immunoreceptor to Sangamo BioSciences Inc., and intends to collaborate with Sangamo on utilizing this technology with an existing zinc finger nuclease technology to treat glioblastoma multiforme.
– City of Hope has licensed to Vasix Corporation its library of inhibitors and breakers of AGEs (advanced glycation endproducts), dangerous compounds which cause tissue damage responsible for many familiar complications of diabetes.
– GeneArt has licensed a City of Hope patent detailing DNA polymerase-mediated synthesis of double-stranded nucleic acids.
– AstraZeneca has licensed City of Hope technology in allele-specific PCR, which uses selective amplification to detect single nucleotide polymorphism.