Current News Releases
January 3, 2007
University’s Office of Intellectual Property has overseen increasing number of patents and start-up companies
The University of South Carolina’s Intellectual Property Office is beginning to hit its stride, as measured by the number of invention disclosures received, patents filed, and licenses issued in the past year.
Invention disclosures—the fuel for future patent applications—are humming along. The Intellectual Property Office received 84 invention disclosures in ’06, 20 more than the previous year.
Sixty provisional patent applications were filed on behalf of University faculty in fiscal year 2006, compared with 47 in 2004. Twenty licenses for University-owned technologies were issued in 2006, up from 16 licenses in ’05 and 10 in ’04.
The University’s licensing income hit $405,000 in ’06, up from $236,000 in ’05 and $196,000 in ’04. USC has more than 275 technologies available for licensing.
Another sign of USC’s success in transferring intellectual property to the real world is the number of new start-up companies initiated by faculty members. Five new companies were launched in the past fiscal year and many more are in the pipeline, said Lisa Rooney, director of the Intellectual Property Office.
“The word is getting out that the University has an apparatus in place to facilitate these things,” Rooney said.
Licenses / Options signed
Invention disclosures
Highlighes of promising technologies
- Mechanical
- Body armor technologies
- Friction stir welding
- Electrical
- Photonics and LEDs
- Solor panel design
- Chemical
- Desalination
- Bone regeneration technology
- Magnetic drug delivery
- Fuel cell technologies
- Hydrogen generation
- Hydrogen storage
- Fuel cell membranes
- Fuel cell catalyst
- Fuel cell modeling
- Battery modeling
- BioMass
- Life Sciences
- Antibiotic compounds
- Fluorescent biomarkers
- Plant technologies
- Bone cement
- Nanowires made from plant viruses
- Photocatalyst
- Polymer nanocomposites
- Pharmaceutical
- Rheumatoid arthritis
- Anti-cancer
- Biomedical
- Novel resuscitative fluid (trauma treatment)
- Injectable bone scaffolds for skeletal tissue regeneration
- Hernia repair with novel collagen scaffolds
