What can universities do for life sciences graduate students who might be interested in a career in biotech, or who might simply want to know more about the industry? Stony Brook’s Center for Biotechnology developed an 84-hour course that offers, as the Center’s operations director Diane Fabel describes it, a “comprehensive overview of how science becomes a technology,” and how in turn “technology becomes a product.” The course explores all kinds of questions related to this topic. When a potential product is in sight, “how does the company [that scientists might be working with] think about [this process]? What’s the intellectual property status? What’s the regulatory pathway? What are the financial models used in industry? They work with real intellectual property to develop commercialization strategies.” The course has been expanded into “an Advanced Graduate Certificate. The students that come out of it can often do some work with us to begin to launch their careers. We have a Technology Commercialization Clinic where the students then, under supervision of course, work on corporate projects. Our clients come to us [when] they need a better understanding of the competitive landscape in a certain area. The students will help that company look at what the deal flow is, what was the volume of deals, what was the size of deals, what’s in the clinical trials pipeline, those types of things. They get real experience as consultants with us. Then a few of them, actually, become our employees. We’re trying to create a pipeline of talent and people and the students just say it’s transformative. They’re hungry for it, is the point, the next generation. They want to see the research they’ve done as a doctoral student actually impact society.”
