\Eureka!""
It might not be far fetched to imagine cries of joy coming from the lab of UW-Madison Professor Harry G. Steenbock after he made the breakthrough discovery that vitamin D could be created in milk through ultraviolet radiation.
In 1925, Steenbock could not have known exactly what his discovery would mean for the future of the agricultural industry, but he soon got a taste of what it meant when the Quaker Oats breakfast cereal company offered him $1 million for use of his disclosure, according to Andrew Cohn, who works in media and public relations for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
The invention not only led essentially to the worldwide elimination of rickets by the mid-1900s, but was also the means for the establishment of the WARF. Steenbock, along with eight other alumni, came together to form WARF as the instrument for licensing UW-Madison-invented technologies that would benefit the university, the community and society as a whole.
WARF was established in 1925 and has since served the scientific community by patenting research discoveries at UW-Madison and by licensing technologies to leading companies' not just in Wisconsin, but worldwide. According to the official WARF Web site, http://www.wisc.edu/warf, it also provides ""general research support; new buildings, land and equipment; support for research institutes, centers and laboratories; incentive funds for attracting world-class researchers to UW-Madison; and emergency interventions during times of financial crisis and special need.""
""We are the designated intellectual property management organization for the university,"" said Bryan Renk, director of the Patent and Licensing Department at WARF. ""We are a tax-exempt, nonprofitable, charitable foundation, and all the income we make we gift it back to the university.""
""The university community has been incredibly supportive ... Because of that publicity [from stem-cell research] our amount of disclosures'inventions that professors made'have risen dramatically,"" Cohn said. ""People on campus know that we are here and see that there is a value and public purpose to patenting their disclosures.""
Although WARF is a separate entity from UW-Madison, its employees are granted staff identification cards in order to gain access to university facilities.
""WARF employees have staff status on campus, but we don't actually have any university employees that work for WARF,"" Renk said.
According to the Web site, there is a wide range of technologies WARF has patented, reflecting the broad scope of scientific research at UW-Madison. Some of these technologies have included advances important to the electric power industry, new feats of miniaturization for computer electronics, microscopic electromechanical devices, methods to cure human genetic disorders, compounds that allow ultraviolet light to destroy industrial pollutants in water and new techniques in fiberoptic communications.
""There have been a couple of new breakthroughs in stem-cell research, one in blood' differentiating them into white cells, red cells and platelet cells, and in one in neuro'isolating neuro cells and putting them in mice, and they have worked in mice,"" Cohn said.
There have been more than 3,000 discoveries presented to WARF since Steenbock's 1925 presentation of his vitamin D breakthrough. According to the Web site, based on these disclosures, WARF has obtained more than 1,000 U.S. patents and more than 1,500 foreign equivalents.
""Last year we returned $35 million to the university and over the years we have provided over $620 million [since the establishment of WARF],"" Cohn said.
According to the official WARF Web site, the foundation ""works to facilitate the use of UW-Madison research for the maximum benefit of mankind."" Going all the way back to the establishment of the foundation, WARF has patented inventions that help cure diseases and even technology that deals with organ transplantation.
Among the most profound inventions WARF has patented include Professor Hector DeLuca's breakthrough therapies for cancer, osteoporosis, psoriasis, renal osteodystrophy, multiple sclerosis and other serious human afflictions in the 1970s.
Also notable are Karl Paul Link's blood anticoagulant discoveries of the 1940s that brought new understanding of the blood-clotting mechanism; Professor Charles Mistretta's digital imaging technologies for examining blood vessels which produce highly detailed images and data safely, quickly, and inexpensively; and Professor T. Rock Mackie, Stuart Swerdloff, Ph.D. and Timothy Holmes, Ph.D.'s 1991 invention of a greatly improved technology for radiation therapy for cancer patients called ""tomotherapy.""
Although most recent attention has been focused on WARF's involvement with patenting research discoveries related to embryonic stem cells, it is working with hundreds of professors and other inventors who have submitted disclosures.
""There are so many exciting developments in the university community. The professors here are doing such incredible work,"" Cohn said. ""We're getting incredible disclosures, incredible inventions from all areas of the campus, from the ag school to the engineering school to the medical school. It's a very exciting time in WARF's history. We even have a disclosure from a bunch of [undergraduate] students that we're pretty excited about. Since I've been here this is the first time I've seen this, and it's really neat.""
Because WARF works with all areas of study throughout the university, there has not been a shortage of invention disclosures, and the majority of those disclosures have been accepted by WARF for patent licensing.
""Last year the university gave us a record number of invention disclosures' over 300' and we accepted 65 percent of those,"" Renk said. ""We are active in medical physics, nanotechnology, biotechnology, vitamin D applications and genomics.""
WARF not only serves the Madison community and university, but has enabled the exchange of information on a global scale.
""What the patent system does is a way to publish new inventions,"" Renk said. ""People can see what people are working on, and it can also derive new innovation or science outside the patent. ... We try to transfer that science out to the rest of the world. ... Sometimes we facilitate the transfer from one academic lab to another academic lab outside of Madison.""
Although WARF was established by a small group of alumni volunteers more than 70 years ago, and has since grown to about 35 professional employees, the idea and mission that was first created for the foundation has not been significantly altered over the decades.
""I think that the basic philosophy has remained pretty much unchanged,"" Cohn said. ""Our mission has not changed since the beginning and that mission is to support the world- class research at the university in Madison. We have always carried out that by protecting the university, faculty, staff and students and by licensing' through that the university benefits and the public benefits by bringing resources back to the community.\
