Ohio State, Battelle pledge $10M to nonprofit to bring neurotech inventions to market
In Dr. Tim Lucas, Ohio State University didn't so much recruit an NIH-funded neurosurgeon away from Penn – it acquired a business plan.
Lucas was hired in August 2021 to become the first CEO of the NeuroTech Institute – an independent nonprofit that OSU and research giant Battelle publicly launched on Wednesday. Its mission: speed up the chronically slow process of turning academic discoveries into therapies and medical devices helping patients.
Seeded with an estimated $28 million for operations and researchers, NeuroTech aims to raise $120 million in federal grants and philanthropy in the next few years toward spinning out Columbus biotech startups and landing licensing deals with big pharma.
"You get a lot of provisional patents that get filed, but then that art never gets developed into a company that becomes a business," Lucas said in an interview. "The best discovery in the world in a laboratory means nothing right now to a patient in my clinics.
"All major universities have this problem of tech transfer."
Indeed, OSU has been working to increase the rate of royalty-generating licenses and spinoff creation for more than 15 years.
This three-legged structure changes things, Lucas said: engineering expertise and operations infrastructure from Battelle, Ohio State’s deep and broad bench of academic research, and a separately incorporated institute that can act quickly on research collaborations without all the red tape.
Lucas modeled the structure after Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, founded in 2004 to commercialize technology from sequencing the human genome. A fixture in Cambridge's Kendall Square biotech hub, it played a role in developing CRISPR gene editing and has spun out companies worth billions today. A Broad spinout filed for a $100 million IPO last week, the Boston Business Journal reported.
Research institutions around the country have tried to commercialize neurotechnology, but moving outside the lab into business isn't their forte, said Justin Sanchez, life sciences research fellow at the $10 billion Battelle and one of its representatives on the NeuroTech board.
"It’s a startup here, a startup there. They never have a Battelle also in the mix," Sanchez said. "(At the same time,) Battelle can't do it alone. We do need the foundational research out of OSU."
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