University scientists and tech transfer officers have become increasingly creative in finding ways to work with industry to bring their innovations to market, industry and university experts said last week at the 2025 AUTM annual meeting in National Harbor, Md.
There is no standard path from bench to bedside, said Tingting Zhang -Karas, PhD, Head of Johnson & Johnson’s JLABS program in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states.
No two innovations are alike, competitive landscapes differ and skeptical investors often dictate scientific milestones – including specific experiments – that must be achieved before they’re willing to back the product’s development, she said.
JLABS bills itself as a global life science network for innovation, providing startups with affordable lab space, expertise, industry connections and entrepreneurial programs. So far, the program has nurtured 1,200 startups worldwide, some of them from early-stage identification of a potential therapeutic target to product launch.
Abram Goldfinger, the Executive Director of Industrial Liaison/Technology at New York University, said that, over time, establishing startup companies has become the principal way NYU licenses high-potential technologies.
The most successful approach, Goldfinger said, has been licensing potential products to startup companies that develop the therapy and then partner with big pharma. “A lot of early-stage research is funded by pharma at our university,” he said.
Goldfinger said NYU has been able to create programs that advance technology to a point when those partnerships can occur, based on effective communication and collaboration. “Start-ups, big pharma and the university all bring strengths to the table,” he said.
Ben Holmes, PhD, CEO, of orthopedic device startup Nanochon, said his company developed a method of cushioning damaged joints from research at George Washington University. The technology combines 3D printing and biologically inspired nanomaterials created using a synthetic nylon matrix to produce an implant suitable to repair damaged knees.
George Washington was a local node of the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps program, an entrepreneurship training program for scientists and engineers, helping them to identify a promising “product-market fit.”
“My experience has been very positive,” Holmes said, saying the university supported his interest in entrepreneurism early on, “before we knew what intellectual property was.”
He said he and his collaborators were eager to move their ideas out of the lab and into the marketplace. “We had all kinds of things that we were interested in.”
They found, instead, that “you’re not going to walk out of the university and get [venture capital] funding.”
The university’s technology transfer office, Holmes said, “knew what we needed and when,” and how to set up non-dilutive funding, so the innovators wouldn’t have to give up equity or ownership.
Nanochon’s Chondograft implant is still in development and is not available for use in the United States, but the company is moving closer to a product launch and has moved into manufacturing space in Baltimore.
Keisha Thomas, PhD, Senior Director of early innovation partnering at Johnson & Johnson, credited academic centers with greater “sophistication” in the way they confront the challenges of technology transfer. She acknowledged the notion that many promising ideas never make from bench to bedside – a gulf long derided as the valley of death – and said many universities, such as NYU and GW, are putting structures in place to bridge the gap.
“We’re thirsty for cutting-edge innovations,” Thomas said, but ones for which we can see a pathway to development.”