Sometimes the availability of money nudges the direction your research takes. Glenn Prestwich, organic chemist and former director of the Center for Biotechnology at SUNY Stony Brook, describes how he and his lab ended up working with hyaluronic acid, which has many medical applications. And this proved to be one of the things that led him to become interested in patenting research, which central to the biotech industry.
Glenn Prestwich, interviewed via Zoom on June 20, 2023
Interviewer: Antoinette Sutto
Glenn: … As well as one other project that Dick funded from the Center, which was figuring out what to do, how to do chemical modifications of hyaluronic acid and study its receptors.
Interviewer: Why did he want to do that?
Glenn: They wanted to do that because I had industry funding in the late ’80s to start looking at hyaluronic acid because one of my Chinese students, Jing-wen Kuo, worked for a company in Massachusetts– former students had worked for a company in Woburn, Mass. He writes to me, he says, “I want to come back and get a Ph.D. My company will pay for everything, but they want me to work on hyaluronic acid.” I said, “What’s hyaluronic acid?” He says, “Well, it’s a long water-soluble polymer.” I said, “Stop there, you know my lab, we work on small lipids, not water-soluble polymers.”
He said, “Yes, but they’re paying for everything, and there’s chemistry that nobody knows how it works.” I said, ‘Okay, you got me now, so let’s do it.” He came to the lab. We started working on hyaluronic acid. Everything that we did, trying to show that the literature was right, proved that literature was wrong. And so everything that Jing-wen and I did was publishable and patentable. That’s when I got more interested in patents. We already had patents and patented some lipid stuff from the insect control work.”