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.
The University of Pittsburgh ranked #21 in the nation and in the top 10 of public universities for university technology transfer in a new report from Heartland Forward, a nonprofit whose mission is to whose mission is to improve economic performance in the center of the United States by advocating for fact-based solutions to foster job creation, knowledge-based and inclusive growth and improved health outcomes.
Investment rounds in university-based startups are getting larger and are coming in earlier stages of development, according to Osage University Partners (OUP), a venture capital fund that has raised more than $600 million and has invested in 125 university-based startups. OUP recently held a webinar on the topic of trends in university startup investing.