Every year, university researchers discover potential new drugs, diagnostics, and medical devices that could transform patient care. Yet many of those ideas stall in the "valley of death," the stretch between a promising experiment and a product mature enough to attract investors or industry partners.
Rutgers has spent the past eight years working to change that by building a self-sustaining fund that reinvests revenue from successfully commercialized technologies into the next wave of innovations while also surrounding faculty with industry expertise.
The results to date have been auspicious - so strong, in fact, that leaders from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked university officials to write a paper that now appears in Nature Biotechnology, explaining their model for others to follow.
"One of the key elements at Rutgers was to dedicate a portion of the licensing revenue coming from the successful commercialization of the university's intellectual property assets back into the research and development of emerging technologies," said Reynold A. Panettieri Jr., vice chancellor of translational medicine and science at Rutgers Health.
Many research universities have created internal programs to support the maturation of nascent technologies through early stages of development. Some rely on federal programs, such as the NIH Research Evaluation and Commercialization Hub initiative. Others depend on major philanthropic gifts, state-sponsored proof-of-concept programs, or large industry and investor partnerships.
Those approaches can work, but they're fragile. Grants end, donors and partners change priorities, and few institutions have a stable, built-in source of money for translational work.
According to Pragati Sharma, associate director of commercialization funding at the Rutgers Office for Research, a national survey of university funding programs found Rutgers was the only institution in that cohort with a dedicated patent-policy revenue stream for commercialization.
"This is about making sure taxpayer-funded research doesn't stop at the publication stage," said Michael E. Zwick, senior vice president of research and head of the Office for Research. "We want more of our discoveries to cross the valley of death and become products and services that improve lives."
The story began in 2017, when Rutgers launched its TechAdvance® program to support university inventions across fields by using royalties from a pediatric enzyme replacement therapy developed by university researchers.
It continued in 2019, when Rutgers received federal funds to launch the HealthAdvance Fund®, which is focused on preparing health-technology projects to compete for external funding.
In 2022, Rutgers took the biggest step: it revised its patent policy so that success stories help earlier-stage projects. Under that formula, 5% is earmarked for internal commercialization programs, such as TechAdvance® and HealthAdvance Fund®.
Because that allocation comes from overall technology transfer revenue, rather than from any single deal, it gives Rutgers a predictable stream of funding to advance early-stage projects, even when external grants are scarce.
To stretch those dollars and increase the odds of success, Rutgers adds far more than money. Projects must include industry input before they receive funding. Innovators work with mentors-in-residence and industry reviewers who help shape project plans. Funded teams work with external advisers who track progress and push for experiments that will provide the data points commercial partners need to invest confidently.
"Bringing in investors and industry experts early doesn't just bring money," said Sharma. "It brings their experience about what the market actually needs and what data will support a meaningful inflection point for a technology."
Rutgers also invites strategic and financial investors to co-fund select projects. In those cases, the university and outside partners share the cost of development, and potential licensees help design the work while getting an early look at the teams and technologies.
The model shows tangible results.
Since 2017, Rutgers' internal commercialization funding programs have awarded a little over $12 million to university innovators. The HealthAdvance Fund® has provided over $6 million to 43 projects, while TechAdvance® has contributed about $6.27 million to 115 projects. Together, they have generated an estimated 2.5 to 3.5 times that investment in follow-on funding from venture capital, licensing agreements and additional federal and state grants.
So far, HealthAdvance projects have produced six startups, and several TechAdvance®-funded technologies have been licensed to either existing companies or Rutgers spinouts, including a small-molecule drug that first received internal funding in 2018 and 2019 and was licensed to a small pharmaceutical company this year.
Given how long biomedical products take to reach the market, Rutgers leaders said the greatest financial and clinical impacts are still ahead.
The model is also changing how Rutgers thinks about scholarship. Innovation and entrepreneurial activities - including patenting, startup formation, translational grants, and commercialization-focused sponsored research - now contribute to tenure and promotion.
"Faculty used to see commercialization as something separate from their academic careers," says Vincent A. Smeraglia, executive director of new ventures at the Office for Research and co-author of the article. "By recognizing patents and product development in our tenure and promotion criteria, we are telling our researchers that advancing discoveries toward real-world impact is part of Rutgers' core mission."
