Office of Technology and Business Development

The Office of Technology and Business Development (OTBD) mission is to increase relationships between MSSM and industry and to create a synergistic culture of commercial exploitation of MSSM innovation (patentable or not), consistent with the public good and traditional concerns for academic freedom and independence.

These relationships take several forms, but they all have in common the transfer of MSSM intellectual property (retrospectively or prospectively) in return for some consideration:

The most common activity of OTBD is the licensing of MSSM intellectual property to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology medical device, medical service, or other company in return for royalties and other payments. The intellectual property is almost always an issued or pending patent.

A second source of support is a license agreement that includes support of research as well as potential royalties.

A third type of collaboration is a research agreement without any intellectual property rights or with an option to a license.

A fourth mechanism for commercializing technology is to accept equity in lieu of or in addition to royalties.

The final broad category of industrial relationship is active participation in the formation and capitalization of companies based on MSSM technology and/or faculty.

The OTBD seeks to increase industrial relationships by four broad categories of activity:

raising the awareness of the faculty to the opportunities for and the mechanism of obtaining industrial support;
increasing the awareness of industry to MSSM's intellectual property, faculty and organization assets;
proactively seeking and effectively negotiating agreements with industry; and
contribution to the Schools' strategic development in areas with implications for industrial collaborations.

Collectively, these initiatives will increase both the amount of commercializable innovation by MSSM faculty and the number and quality of industrial collaboration opportunities.

In addition to its business development role, OTBD provides related services to the faculty and the School:

Management of the patent prosecutions
Material Transfer Agreement
Confidentiality Agreements
Faculty Consulting Agreements
Administration of License and Research income

Collectively, these activities represent a significant fraction of OTBD's activities. In addition to protecting intellectual property and potential intellectual property, they provide an opportunity to expose faculty to industry and to develop strong relationships between faculty and OTBD.

These FAQs contains answers handled by our support staff, along with some tips and tricks that we have found useful and presented here as questions.