The Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) identifies technologies developed at City of Hope that have potential for commercial application. Once such technologies are identified, the office works with inventors through the patent process and negotiates agreements with prospective partners to commercialize the intellectual property.

Pyrophosphorolysis Activated Polymerization (PAP-A)
PAP-A is a powerful technology that may be the foundation of the next generation of tools to study genetic variation.

Key Aspects

• Novel and sensitive enzymatic approach for the detection of genetic mutations
• Orders of magnitude more accurate and sensitive than PCR
• Resistant to false priming and ideally suited for detecting rare (low abundance) genetic material
• Potentially useful for the early detection of new cancers or relapse, high fidelity genome sequencing; monitoring early stage transplant engraftment/rejection; and forensic testing
• 8 US and foreign patents issued

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:

Alzheimer’s disease treatments– City of Hope has developed novel synthetic peptides that reverse the effects of amyloid β protein implicated in Alzheimer’s disease development.

New siRNA technology– 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.

Glioblastoma treatment– 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.

Nucleic acid synthesis– GeneArt has licensed a City of Hope patent detailing DNA polymerase-mediated synthesis of double-stranded nucleic acids.

Allele-specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR)– AstraZeneca has licensed City of Hope technology in allele-specific PCR, which uses selective amplification to detect single nucleotide polymorphism.