He wants Penn faculty's best inventions

In an effort to encourage more faculty inventions and commercialize discoveries, the University of Pennsylvania has hired the guy doing that job at another Ivy League school - Columbia University.

Michael J. Cleare for the last seven years has been in charge of Columbia's technology-transfer strategy, handling licensing deals with business, getting industry-sponsored research collaborations, creating tiny start-up firms, and building rapport with Columbia faculty.

Starting Aug. 1, he will do the same thing at Penn, where he will be associate vice provost for research and executive director of the Center for Technology Transfer.

Cleare, 63, is an inventor himself, of Carboplatin, a widely used chemotherapy drug. He worked 33 years for Johnson Matthey, a British specialty-materials company, and came to this area in 1989 to run its U.S. businesses in Malvern. He lives in Kennett Square.

A native Briton with a doctorate in chemistry from the University of London, Cleare says he is up for another challenge and has a system that worked at Columbia for getting more disclosures of inventions from faculty, improving interactions with business and industry, and getting university discoveries to the marketplace.

"Everything starts with the faculty," Cleare said. "Penn is not getting the most out of its faculty." The faculty have, "for whatever reason, found it hard to work with this office. I've got to change that."

Cleare said his top priority would be gaining the confidence of faculty, who need to be involved in order to increase the number of inventions, patents, licensing agreements, start-up firms, and industry-sponsored research collaborations.

"You have to be proactive with faculty. This has nothing to do with Penn. It happens at every university," Cleare said. "You can't sit in an office and expect the inventions to walk through the door."

Cleare says he plans to put at least three licensing officers in Penn's medical school. About 80 percent of successful inventions at any research university come from the medical school, he said.

Cleare's "number-two priority" is hiring a high-caliber staff that will serve the faculty and respond quickly when opportunities arise.

"If they want a confidentiality agreement to go visit a company, we'll make sure they get it in a timely fashion. If they make requests, we've got to respond quickly," he said. "We have a system at Columbia to give immediate, one- to two-day response times. That's been a problem in this office."

Cleare is joining Penn after a period of tumult and turnover in the tech-transfer center leadership. Longtime executive director Louis P. Berneman abruptly resigned in 2005, after Penn's former vice provost for strategic initiatives, Leslie Hudson, announced a sweeping reorganization of operations. Then Hudson himself left in July 2005, and that fall Penn named John Zawad to manage tech-transfer initiatives. He stayed in the job just 17 months.

In hiring Cleare, Penn got a "superstar from the academic world of technology transfer," with a broad vision of opportunities for academic researchers to interact and work with industry, said Penn vice provost for research Steven J. Fluharty. "Not just licensing opportunities, not just start-up companies, but also industry-sponsored research agreements."

While Penn gets almost $800 million in total research grants, including nearly $500 million from the National Institutes of Health - second in NIH grants to Johns Hopkins - it has lagged in generating licensing fees from the research, reporting about $8 million to $8.5 million a year.

In contrast, Columbia receives about $600 million in research grants, and reports licensing income of $130 million - most of that from three lucrative patents.

It is misleading to compare Penn and Columbia, Cleare said. "Penn doesn't have a big hit patent. If you took away the three big patents, Columbia would get only about $12 million a year. Most of the money comes from running royalties.

"That's why it's so important to put in place agreements that have good terms, so if a product is successful, you get good money flow from it.

"My strength is doing good deals. I'm a dealmaker," Cleare said. "We're not just doing this for cash. We're doing this to try to transfer technology to the outside world for the good of society, and if we can make some cash while we do it, that's very good. If you do one properly, the other will probably follow."

From the start, faculty members will be invited to make presentations on their own discoveries to the patent lawyers and licensing staff and sit in on the discussions. Previously, faculty were handed the decision. "I want to get them more involved."

Cleare wants to increase the number of start-ups and "get new spinouts back on the agenda," which are important for stimulating economic development locally and creating jobs. "I'm hoping the business community will have another look at the University of Pennsylvania in terms of start-up companies," he said. "I hope the venture capitalists and seed-funders will come knocking on my door."

With a top business school in Wharton close by, and prestigious law, medical and other schools, Cleare plans to institute a formal intern program and pay Penn students $20 an hour to help evaluate inventions. "If we want to do start-ups, Wharton is very keen in getting involved helping us," he said. "And I want to take advantage of the skills and expertise of professors in the law school and the business school."

Cleare said Penn has promised him a $500,000 "validation" fund for his discretionary use to "move good inventions along." Early-stage technology can get stuck because it's too soon to interest industry or an investor. By spending $30,000 or $50,000, a faculty member can often do a key test that would move the invention to the point others would be interested. Cleare said he knew of at least 50 universities with small internal seed funds.

"Whatever has been done in the past, I want to try to do it a bit better," he said. "I'm coming from seven good years at Columbia, and I'm going to try to introduce a similar approach. What I tell everybody is, we are going to take the best of Penn, and the best of Columbia, and see if we can put them together."