CSU Ventures gains momentum, spurs growth

Since CSU Ventures was founded in 2007, Colorado State University has seen more inventions disclosed, more licenses awarded and more startups than in the previous 40 years, according to Todd Headley, president of CSU Ventures.

CSU Ventures was a rebranding initiative of the CSU Technology Transfer Office at the CSU Research Foundation.

“The university’s commitment to grow a program that is right sized for CSU, for a $300 million-plus research institution, that’s what made the difference. Then you gain momentum over the years,” says Headley. “People began to understand we’re here, can help and execute. There was a little word of mouth and a lot of effort on our part in reaching out to the university, to the faculty and staff and outreach into the community. Becoming a more visible component in the city and state made a difference as well.”

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In the past decade, the organization has filed 1,381 patent applications, signed 369 license agreements, established 1,064 inventions and launched 49 startup companies. It also has tallied almost $19 million in licensing income in that same time frame.

CSU tech transfer realized that it needed additional people to be able to expand its offerings and capabilities. Having talented people to respond to incoming intellectual property and to work on licensing was important, Headley says. CSU was recognized by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities as an Innovation & Economic Prosperity University in 2016 and is touting itself as an economic development university, he adds, so that means CSU Ventures has placed a renewed emphasis on startup companies.

“It’s not any one thing that we did but lots and lots of small and medium things came together to build the program up,” Headley says.

The Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering and Department of Biology are the two largest contributors to CSU Ventures, which makes sense because they are CSU’s largest research colleges as well, but the organization also sees intellectual property from natural sciences like chemistry and is very active within the veterinary school, clinical sciences and agriculture.

CSU Ventures helps students, faculty and staff work their way up from an idea to a potentially money-making proposition.

“It is a very long process. It starts with years of research at the bench but at some point we will see invention disclosure. From there until something is commercialized and generating revenue from commercialization is several years,” he says. “It depends on the technology. Something in software would be shorter. Anything that has a rigid regulatory path, like the human health side, would be longer.”

He points out that most inventions take between five and 10 years to come to fruition.

CSU Ventures typically sees 100 to 120 new invention disclosures every year and, to some degree, they are accumulating. The organization’s active portfolio is larger than that because different inventions are in different stages of development.

“The people who do the licensing here, they’ve got everything from things coming in the door to looking at licensing things that have been around several years,” Headley says. “They spend time working on relationships with the researchers, want a deep understanding of what is going on in the labs and what applications there are for translational activities.”

Many people believe they can file for a patent and get it in a month. The reality is the patent process can take three to four years, he says, so that’s where it is nice to have a diversity of inventions from different departments.

“Technology transfer is an interesting intersection of law, business and science. On top of that, we are seeing great new ideas coming out of the university so we are always getting to see cutting edge ideas and things that could really have an impact on society,” says Headley. “That’s the great fun part of our job for sure.”

CSU Ventures continues to evolve how it works by looking at its structure and how the team approaches problems. For instance, it matured its process for helping startups quite a bit since CSU Ventures first started.

“Part of that is our thinking and part of that is there are a lot more resources and different resources available in the community and state than 10 years ago,” Headley says.

It created a new effort within the CSU Ventures office called NewCo Launchpad as a way to be more supportive of startup companies and help them to be more successful.

“It’s not necessarily having more startup companies but having startup companies that have the best chance [at success],” he says. “It’s really ultimately about can they attract funding, can they attract leadership, and can they get off the ground and begin to work toward a product.”

CSU Ventures currently has parts of two positions dedicated to NewCo Launchpad.

NewCo Launchpad starts its evaluation of any new innovations further upstream looking at whether it makes sense to be a startup, license it to a traditional company or whether it doesn’t make sense to be a startup. It evaluates the market to see if the new technology will fill a hole and whether or not there is a customer base for it. If those things are true, the organization will continue to put time and effort and resources into development of the company. If it isn’t true, the right answer may be to not launch the company and focus its efforts elsewhere, Headley says.

CSU Ventures works with Innosphere, which helps it evaluate its startup pipeline. CSU also has a couple of incubators on campus, the Research Innovation Center and The Powerhouse Energy Campus.

“Part of the ecosystem is to not just launch companies but to have a place for them to go and have partners help us with that,” he says.

VetDC, Inc. is a local company that was started through CSU Ventures in 2009. The Fort Collins-based company has an FDA-approved drug for use in treating lymphoma in dogs called Tanovia-CA1.

Many companies come to the CSU Flint Animal Cancer Center to test their programs on animals and in dogs in particular, says Steven Roy, president and CEO of VetDC, Inc.

“They were asking them, I know you develop this for humans, have you ever thought to develop it for the veterinary marketplace?” he says. Many said it was an interesting idea but not the focus of their research, but some said they would be interested in a relationship where they could license out or sell technologies for veterinary development.

“That was where the opportunity was first discovered by the folks at CSU Ventures. We could build a business around this,” Roy says.

CSU Ventures had already set up the shell of the company before Roy got involved. The organization was just looking for someone who could run it.

Roy got involved working with CSU Ventures to pursue some leads, companies doing trial work or interested in doing work at CSU to see if they would be interested in giving VetDC the rights to programs to develop for animal health.

“We used the CSU Ventures team to help us put our website together initially and to help get the leads for the first couple of ideas for new programs we could bring in-house and build a pipeline,” says Roy. “Some of the legal support also came out of the Ventures team. It was a very collaborative effort where we leveraged their expertise and resources they had on hand to really get the company off the ground, as well as introducing us to potential sources of financing throughout the state of Colorado.”

Tanovia-CA1 is the first drug to come out of this startup company.

Terry Opgenorth, vice president of CSU Ventures, mentored Roy, and having his connections really helped VetDC get the opportunity for Tanovia and helped it get a license from Gilead Sciences.

VetDC began raising significant capital in 2012, and the company was reincorporated at that same time.

“At that point, we didn’t need the CSU Ventures team anymore. We were running on our own in 2012. We are an example of what they are set up to do, find interesting business opportunities, help them get started and give them enough support to go out on their own,” Roy says.

Five years from now, Headley believes CSU Ventures will be doing many of the same things it is doing today.

“We will continue to evolve with the university. It is important that we partner with and work with the university as seamlessly as we can to support their research and translational initiatives,” he says.