Experienced patent examiners from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) visited the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship's brand new Big Idea Center for student innovation recently to give a presentation on the patent process, in which they provided an insightful overview of how the patent office works and shared tips on the optimum approach to applying for a patent. You weren't able to make it? That's OK. We recorded it for you. So if you have a discovery that you want to file patent protection for, check out the presentation, which includes questions from some of the Pitt innovators in attendance.
The last time we checked in on Pitt startup Lumis Corp. it was still a one-man show and seeking its first customers. As we catch up with the company today it has a new CEO that is not necessarily new the company, several paying customers, and is seeking an investment round to accelerate its growth.
Leading up to the fireworks that boom and echo across the hills and valleys of Western Pennsylvania on the Fourth of July, a group of Pitt innovators were busy determining whether their discoveries might make a huge impact on people’s lives.
It took six months of proposal drafting, the collaboration of multiple Pitt organizations – together with eight academic partners -- and over 60 small business and other industry partners, followed by an agonizing year-long wait. But last month the monumental effort bore fruit. The Defense Health Agency (DHA) announced that the Pitt consortium will be one of a select group of organizations, and only one of two universities, to compete for as much as $10 billion in contracts from the Department of Defense to develop health care innovations over the next five years through the Omnibus IV program.
Within four years of arriving at Pitt for a clinical and research fellowship in Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine (PACCM), Jason Rose had obtained a master’s in business administration degree and launched a startup company based on his lab’s research into antidotes for carbon monoxide poisoning. Rose’s timing was auspicious, as he launched his company, Globin Solutions, just as the University revised its policies around faculty participation in startups to provide more flexibility and more incentives for researchers to take that final step to ensure their discoveries make a real-world impact on people’s lives.