National lab seeks biomed collaborators

Research-Technology Management, March-April, 2002 by Peter Gwynne

Technology partnerships between the U.S. government and private industry have started to decline. In the biomedical area, however, collaborations in which private firms set out to commercialize science and technology developed in the national laboratories are growing.

Two trends have created an enterprising new route for companies in the biomedical arena to convert R&D into effective products and services. On the one hand, biomedical companies are increasingly outsourcing large chunks of their R&D as even the largest pharmaceutical corporations recognize that they cannot carry out research across the entire range of diseases for which they want to find cures. On the other hand, the federal government has encouraged the Department of Energy's national laboratories to make their research available to the private sector ever since the demise of the Soviet Union.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California is one increasingly prominent source of commercializable technology. The organization that developed the hydrogen bomb has several broad technologies relevant to biomedicine. Its historical scientific foundations in radioactive materials, lasers, computing, and automation can transition neatly into such biomedical applications as radiation therapy, sensing and imaging, and remote diagnosis and treatment. More recently, Lawrence Livermore has developed expertise in such strictly biomedical pursuits as the analysis of genomes.

Taken in combination, this means a wealth of opportunities for industrial partners to develop applications for nascent technologies. In recent years, Lawrence Livermore has produced roughly 20 patents annually in biomedicine and biotechnology. That type of intellectual property has a natural appeal to an industry that includes small start-ups without the financial resources to undertake large programs of long-horizon research. The laboratory's research programs in life science parallel the long-term needs of many potential industrial partners. "We are taking advantage of the opportunity that the things industry needs to know are the things that we are good at," says Lawrence Livermore's John Marion.

Industry Partners Consortium

Until recently, industrial collaborations intended to apply Livermore's technologies to commercial biomedicine and biotechnology occurred somewhat haphazardly. Certainly they have produced successes; California company EndoVasix, Inc., for example, has recently brought to clinical trials a system based on Lawrence Livermore technology that it licensed in 1996. The system uses laser pulses fed through an optical fiber threaded in a catheter to emulsify blood clots in stroke patients.

Despite those efforts, says Marion, "the general feeling was that we weren't doing a very good job of connecting with industry and making firms aware of what we were doing." Consequently, in November 2000, the lab set out to remedy that by creating the Industry Partners Consortium for Bio and Medical Technology Development, with Marion as its director. The consortium links Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of California, Davis, Health System in an organization that provides private-sector companies with access to medical and technological skills to help them to develop new biomedical products and services.

The consortium has the goal of improving the medical outcomes of patients by perfecting and commercializing new technologies that apply the medical expertise of doctors in the UC Davis Health System and technical expertise of Lawrence Livermore scientists. "Before we set up the IPC, the question was whether the process of making our technology available was efficient from our side as well as our industrial partners," says Marion. "The whole IPC idea was to make it work better."

The basic focus is to help industrial partners take technologies that have reached the proof-of-concept stage to the working prototype phase and into early clinical trials. The partners, who sign up for the program without charge, can receive technical briefings on specific technologies from a large menu of options. Fields of current emphasis at Livermore include bio-microelectromechanical systems, imaging technologies, telemedicine, radiation therapies, radar and ultrasound imaging, photoacoustic therapies, and treatments for cancers, stroke, infectious diseases, and orthopedic problems.

Two recent successes illustrate the scope of the program. The Food and Drug Administration has cleared NOMOS Corporation, a Pennsylvania firm that specializes in radiation therapy, to market Peregrine, a technology developed at Livermore that gives physicians a more accurate means of predicting radiation doses during cancer therapy. The system, based on Monte Carlo calculations, stems from original work by nuclear physics and computer simulation groups at Lawrence Livermore.

Elsewhere, California company BioLuminate, Inc. is developing a "Smart Probe" to detect breast cancer. The optimal system is expected to prove as accurate as surgical biopsies but without removing any tissue. "BioLuminate got the early ideas from NASA," recalls Marion. "Then we helped them to organize and miniaturize the sensor suite, which contains five different optical and electrical technologies in a needle. We built 50 probes for them; they are just starting human trials at UC Davis and the University of California, San Francisco."