VOL. 23, NO. 16	FEBRUARY 27, 1998

olumbia ranks first among private research universities and second overall in the amount of patent income it received in fiscal 1996, earning $38.8 million from new medical technologies, software and other innovations, according to a survey made public this month.

  Only the combined total for the nine campuses of the University of California system was higher, at $57.1 million, according to the Association of University Technology Managers survey issued Feb. 18. Columbia out-performed Stanford, which earned patent income of $28.8 million and fell to second place among private universities after holding the top spot for several years.

  “It’s not insignificant that Columbia is the top earner of royalty income among private universities nationwide,” said Vice Provost Michael Crow. “What’s more exciting is the new research we’re hearing about from Columbia scientists, engineers and medical practitioners that has the potential to improve human life. We look forward to developing those innovations for practical use.”

  The ranking is by adjusted gross income, which does not include income that universities collect for other institutions under joint patent agreements. Adjusted gross income, rather than gross license income received, has been adapted by the Chronicle of Higher Education as its reporting standard. A table of patent income from the survey appears in its Feb. 23 issue.

  The University has recently conducted its own analyses of its research enterprise:

Private institution ranking

  According to an analysis by Associate Vice Provost Raphael Kasper, Columbia’s research and development expenditures, a measure of the general health of the University’s research enterprise, increased 34 percent in 1990-95, second only to Penn’s 43.8 percent among major private research universities.

  Caltech, Yale, Harvard, Brown, MIT, Dartmouth, Cornell, Princeton, Chicago and Stanford followed Columbia, in that order.

  The ranking represents a considerable change from the 1972-95 and 1985-95 periods, when Columbia was ninth and eighth in the peer group respectively.

  Two factors have contributed to Columbia’s rate of increase in R&D spending, Kasper said. President George Rupp’s strategy of encouraging multidisciplinary research has attracted considerable new research funding to campus.

  Additionally, Columbia channels some of the patent income it receives into a Strategic Research Fund administered by Crow. That fund disburses about $4 million to $5 million annually to promising Columbia researchers and often helps them develop a research track record.

“Research and Innovation” ranking

  Columbia dropped from 13th to 14th place among universities nationwide in the amount of federal research monies received in fiscal 1995, according to the annual Columbia University Briefing on Research and Innovation issued by the Office of the Vice Provost late last year.

  The College of Physicians & Surgeons’ ranking was unchanged at fourth among medical schools.

  The report also found a general decline among major University units in research expenditures from fiscal 1995 to 1996, by 3.29 percent.

  Among the exceptions to the trend were the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, where research expenditures rose 14 percent, and the School of Social Work, which saw a 6 percent increase.

  Lower levels of federal research funding are the principal explanation for the decline, Crow said. But the University has also moved to diversify its funding sources, with more private, corporate and foundation sponsorship. And the vice provost also noted that annualized awards increased over the period by 5.5 percent, an indicator that research expenditures would soon be increasing.

Patent income ranking

  Part of the reason for Columbia’s rise over Stanford in patent income was the expiration of the Cohen-Boyer patent, one of Stanford’s most remunerative, which, like Columbia’s lead patent, describes a system for manufacturing complex proteins by inserting genes into mammalian cells.

  The Columbia patent, which expires in 2001, covers the co-transformation process developed by Richard Axel, Higgins Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics and professor of pathology; Saul Silverstein, professor of microbiology, and Michael J. Wigler, adjunct professor of genetics and development at Columbia and head of mammalian cell genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. The government protects patents for 17 years.

  The co-transformation process has been used to develop a number of important drugs, such as tissue plasminogen activator (TPA), which if administered in the early stages of a heart attack can halt damage by activating an enzyme normally present in the blood that dissolves blood clots, and erythropoietin (EPO), which stimulates the production of red blood cells and is used to treat certain AIDS patients and those undergoing kidney dialysis.

  More than half the University’s patents are for pharmaceuticals or other medical technologies developed at Columbia’s College of Physicians & Surgeons. Other recent successes, from the fiscal 1997 report of the Columbia Innovation Enterprise, the University’s technology licensing office, include:

• Establishment of a collaboration with VIMRx Pharmaceuticals Inc., which will fund research worth $30 million in the Columbia Genome Center, a consortium of laboratories whose goal is to identify genes that cause disease;

• Launching of new drugs developed at Columbia to treat glaucoma, multiple sclerosis and retinitis;

• Approval by the U.S. Department of Justice of a patent pool for the MPEG-2 video compression standard developed by Dimitris Anastassiou, professor of electrical engineering;

• Licensing to Cyclovision Inc., a start-up firm, of the Omnicamera, a videocamera that sees in all directions and was developed by Shree K. Nayar, professor of computer science, and

• Licensing to an oil services firm of so-called “4D-seismic” software developed at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory to monitor three-dimensional seismic data over time, important to maximizing oil and gas production.

  “We’re particularly encouraged by these developments, especially the genome center funding and the formation of the MPEG-2 licensing pool,” Crow said. “The former holds the promise of treating genetic disease, which has so far defied medical science. The latter should provide the University with a major new revenue stream as the Axel patent expires.