Speaker 1  0:00  
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to tto roles during COVID 19 rapid response on campus presented by Autumn. My name is Holly Lundgren, Autumn's online professional development manager, and I'll be your staff host for today.

Speaker 1  0:19  
All lines have been muted to ensure high quality audio. And today's webinar is being recorded. If you have a question for the presenters, you can type it in the Q and A box at any time. Additionally, we're trying to make this webinar just a little bit more interactive, so after the speakers present their presentation, we'll like to we'll open it up for some discussion. At that time, you can either enter your questions or experiences to share in the Q and A box. Or if you raise your hand, we can call on you and unmute your line temporarily. I want to take a brief moment to thank Autumn's annual webinar sponsor, Marshall Gerstein and Boren. Thank you for your continued support of the webinar program, and now I'll turn it over to our distinguished speakers. Welcome to Oren, Robin, Rick and Philip.

Speaker 2  1:14  
Hey guys. One of the one of the downsides of doing this during this, the pandemic, but thanks for joining us today. I actually, you know, Holly, I don't know if you I mentioned to my fellow panelists that my power went out about 10 minutes ago, and so I'm doing this on battery life over my cell connection, which means I'll be with you for as long as I'm with you, and then everyone else will have to take over again. So, you know, this was prompted by, I think initially, a post I made to autumn about our experience about sort of seven or eight days into most of us working remotely, when we found ourselves thrust into the middle of a situation that was almost unrecognizable from the way we normally do business at Columbia. And and so wait, I'm sorry, Holly, are we going to do? Should we do a round of introductions first? Everyone knows who we are, or should we just get started?

Speaker 1  2:07  
Um, yeah, probably do a round of introductions first, and then you can switch off with your presentations. Okay?

Speaker 2  2:14  
Oren her switch from Columbia University. I run the tech transfer office and do a bunch of other stuff relating to innovation, entrepreneurship. City, State and Federal Relations, Rick, I'll hand it off to

Speaker 3  2:29  
you. Yes. Hi, Rick Huebsch, Executive Director of Technology Commercialization University of Minnesota, and it includes our startup activities and our tech transfer office. And we're excited to be able to participate in this session, and looking forward to hearing from the rest of the panelists. Robin.

Speaker 4  2:49  
Hi, I'm Robin racer, Executive Director of the Office of licensing and ventures at Duke University. And I hope, I wish Hallie hadn't shown those pictures, because I hope someday that I will see a hairdresser again and look like that.

Unknown Speaker  3:03  
And I'm Phil icari from Partners Healthcare, from the innovation office. I have responsibility for operations within innovation, and have been spearheading our support of the COVID response. Okay, Oren, you're up. Oren, back to you,

Speaker 2  3:21  
sorry, and I was on I was on mute. Yeah. So this is so we thought that we'd start this off by just giving a little bit of an overview of the kinds of things that we each have been seeing on our campuses, and a sense of why they felt sort of uncomfortable and some of the new roles we've been thrown into. But we were going to try and do that in sort of 510 minutes each, and then open it up for questions from the audience, or, frankly, sharing of your own experiences so far, because we are all learning from each other as we go here, it has been a whole I know we could not have gotten through this last couple of weeks without Phil's guidance. And Phil's been great. And this team of partners in the former Cleveland Clinic Team folks from Duke and so it was a huge privilege each other and go, What the hell? How did this work? So anyway, our experience so far, and Holly, if we could go to the next slide. So this really around in sort of mid March, it became pretty clear that New York was bedlam. Unfortunately, even though we weren't the first cluster to appear in the country, things in New York were pretty clearly going a very, very bad direction, very fast. And where that was first showing up was was yes, in terms of the infection rate, but also in terms of the hospitals being out of the most very basic protective, PPE, personal protective equipment that that you sort of come to expect to see a hospital. And so those of us in New York, not only you know, partially acting out of altruism, but also out of fear, frankly, because our friends and family and. These are the hospitals that we work at. It was Columbia, but it was also Mount Sinai and Sloan Kettering and NYU and Sunni, the hospitals. And we were getting increasingly terrified inbound interest from from the hospitals. So so as the New York Times had the article, it was at war with no ammo. Basically, they had nothing to back them. The doctors had nothing to back them up when they're trying to care for these cases. So this, I was not involved at this point the call, there's an article that I can circulate around afterwards. But a call went from the hospital, the head of procurement at the hospital and some of the clinicians to our engineering school, saying, Is there anything you can do to help? And so a whole bunch of things kicked off at once. So first of all, and if you hit, if you hit Next slide. So first of all, in a remarkable show of spirit, one of the Columbia librarians, who was an aficionado of makerspaces, started trying to 3d print face shields using the makerspace printers in the libraries. But the problem is the campus was then closed. And so what I understand is she basically took the maker, the 3d printers, away from campus, and loaded them in the back of her car and set them up in her kitchen, in her apartment, and had friends over, and they started to crank out these face shields. And so in that first couple of days, they managed to, over the course of the week, deliver something like 7000 face shields to New York Presbyterian and some other other hospitals neighborhood. Next slide. So meanwhile, though, a group of Columbia engineers got together and started iterating in a more formal way, on on a face shield. And what they realized very quickly was that at the scale the hospitals needed a New York Presbyterian alone said they needed 50,000 a day, so cranking them out on a 3d printer just wasn't going to work. And so they took the design constraint of it needed to be something that could be tool and die cut at those kind of quantities. So it needed to be no more than a second per mask. So they came up with a couple of different designs that could be flat, printed in standards of tool and die techniques. We got in touch with contract manufacturers, helped get the pricing right as quickly as possible, put the designs up for click licensing down one path so they could be released for free for if hospitals around the country and around the world wanted to use them, they could for free for a year and find their own manufacturing. But also, we found manufacturers that could supply New York Presbyterian Mount Sinai SUNY and a bunch of regional hospitals with mass directly. So it's pretty remarkable if it hits space again over the course of seven days from the first iteration until 2 million of these were in production, being delivered to the hospitals around New York. There's actually now it's also in use in the UK and Ireland, various places around Europe, in Morocco, in Thailand. So these designs and and, and that's just one project. So next slide. Meanwhile, so we were, we were heavily involved in that. That was essentially 24/7 we the team of around six of us from the tech transfer office that was trying to shepherd that through. And I'll talk in a little bit about what our roles were. But meanwhile, that's just the beginning of it. So the engineering schools launched a DIY ventilator challenge every two weeks. The medical school has a half day symposium where each faculty member comes on and talks for 15 minutes about the work they're doing really COVID to try and fire each other and look for collaboration opportunities. And the engineering school, again, is trying to harness the alumni community and students and faculty across campus through these COVID tech innovation forums, and so it has really launched an explosion of innovation around campus, which has been beautiful to see next slide. So already, we are tracking 50 new COVID innovations across campus. We have them all listed on our website. We added them to our search engine, but also created a specialized page for therapeutics, diagnostics, PPE, medical devices in various stages of development. Some of these are new ideas that came about just because of COVID. Some of these were projects that were already underway in some way or other, but were not identified as relevant until until this crisis hit and realized they were relevant. Some of them are technologies that are already out and licensed to startups, but look to be relevant for the crisis in a meaningful way. And so we're trying to sort of categorize those and make sure that when we get these more flooded with these inbound inquiries about, like, what is Columbia got that we have this stuff organized already and don't have to be responsive, but rather, can be proactive. Next slide, and that's just at Columbia. So I think this is what, what what got this conversation going is, not only did we immediately call our peers around the. Country and say, How are you guys handling other stuff? But also it came clear that you weren't the only we weren't the only school that was working on collisions, working on these solutions. These were this kind of collaborative effort was going on across the country and around the world. And so our face shields team were collaborating with the Mass General and partners face shield team up in Boston, there was a ventilator challenge that was going on across universities. There's a whole bunch of great stuff going on. And you can even just tell just from the tech transfer tactics news report from that week. This week's Top Stories, if you just skim through these, there were all of these universities that have all these great COVID related innovations, essentially filled up the whole newsletter just from COVID. So this is going on everywhere across the country. Next slide. The challenge here is that we are not used to playing this game, by the way, since Robin, since you're not on mute and you are a sports fan, do you recognize what sport This is curling? There you go. So so there's lots of analogies for what I thought our job has suddenly become, but I chose curling mostly because they have the best pants I've seen in a long time. I didn't know that was part of the curling thing. But in addition to the pants, like I feel like our job has largely been to try and clear the path for all the stuff that has already been shoved down the ice and is in motion, and our our choices were really do nothing and just let it crash into a wall or try and guide it to the right outcome. So if and what do I mean by that? I think if you go to the next slide, there's a lot of roles that we suddenly found ourselves in that we weren't really used to. I mean, most of us in this profession, if we're lucky, 5% of what we work on in a given year will end up making an impact on humanity in some way or other, and in the vast majority of cases, if it does so, it will be eight to 15 years into the future. And all of a sudden, here we were in a world where our proactive, either positive or negative decisions, were going to have an impact on on patient lives in a week or in a couple of days. I mean, when we did the math, 50,000 masks a day means that every hour, there were 2000 patient doctor generations that were that were not being protected just at one hospital. So if we weren't working that night, if we were like, well, look at this and get back to it a few days. That's 10s of 1000s of patient, Doctor interactions that we were not helping. Those were lives that were going to be lost from our inaction. Because what was stopping this was not the innovators, they had the ideas, and it was not the hospitals they were ready to buy. It was all that bureaucratic mess in the middle. So we found is our job very quickly became bureaucracy busting,

Speaker 2  12:52  
making very fast and very uncomfortable decisions as quickly as we could. And a lot of work in the Rolodex, I think Rick will talk about this later, but we found our main job was getting calls and saying, Do you know anyone who blank? And then we would just start dialing around and be like, does anyone know how to deal with this? Anyone ever had this before? So it's a lot of quick go, no go decisions on patenting. And I'll say that we did patent the face shields initially, because, frankly, we are an office that patents things. So it felt comfortable. We realized later on that that probably wasn't necessary, and so we have not been patenting most of the new PPE related innovations. Frankly, it's probably good. We did patent the face shield ones because we're now in discussions with a commercial manufacturer and distributor about picking that up and running with it, and they did want to patent not for during the crisis, but for when the crisis is over. They like the designs enough that they would like to be able to distribute them commercially. Thereafter, we've gotten to know the hospital sourcing managers around New York, which is a community I'd never known before, but it's been great because one of our biggest concerns is that our engineers, it's going to be like, we were a little afraid we'd be like Wile E Coyote, that we'd be like, still working on face shields two weeks after they'd already solved the face shield problem, and we've seen that happen, they'll be like, we need thermometers. Everyone needs to drop every we literally, New York ran out of thermometers in our hospitals. So a note came in saying, Can you guys make thermometers? And everyone spins up and starts trying to make thermometers, only to find out that they then found a stash of thermometers, but nobody had let anyone know. So those kinds of things are terrifying. Working with contract manufacturing groups around the country and trying to find supplies. I mean, when we started this process, we were having these discussions with contract manufacturers, a group I've never spoken to before, and they would say, Sure, I can make 100,000 a week. We'd say, great. And then they call us back and say, Oh, wait, no, I can't, because we are the whole country is out of PT plastic, the whole country. But don't worry, we can find the resin and get it made. It'll just be a delay, and then an hour later, they'd call back and say, there's no more resin. If you guys can get us resin, we make the PT to make your officials still, it's just some. That we certainly have never learned how to do before. Our General Counsel's Office, Melissa Cohen, was amazing, and we brought her in very early on, she got we were trying to do, and she said, I'm going to make this work. And she just, in a couple of hours, she came up with a click license that we've been calling the please don't sue us license we've been distributing. Whoever wants it, and just email me if you need it. It's not perfect, but it got everyone comfortable enough to be able to distribute this stuff. So that was good enough. We brought on, thank God, one of our former executives in residence, Erica Moses, who is phenomenal. We brought her back on week by week, just to help us out. So she's been quarterbacking a lot of this. She brought in some of her regulatory expert friends to provide advice, and so we can give advice to the teams on regulatory there were things like a hospital would say, we'll take half a million. This literally happened. The hospital said we'll take half a million. And the contract manufacturer said, Great, send me a purchase order. And then a couple of days went by and we didn't hear from anybody. So we called them both, and the hospital said, yeah, they're on their way. They're being shipped. And the contract manufacturer said, I never got the purchase order, so I haven't started making them yet. And so we had to jump back in and just like, fix stuff in a part of the world that we don't normally roll up our sleeves and muck around in. We've gotten a ton of inbound inquiries from really great industry partners like Con Ed and Microsoft and Hitachi chemicals and ExxonMobil chemicals looking for ways to help. And again, it was just kind of what, like, Who do we know and what are we what are they working on? And we've been doing a lot of work with the city in particular, and also New York State, and some work at the federal government, trying to coordinate across these groups, because everyone's just trying to figure out how to be helpful and how to not get in the way. So, you know, and this is just week three, right? So I think we're still learning. We're now working on intubator boxes and nasal swabs, and it looks like New York may be over the hump. And so unfortunately, I think some of you guys are probably the next and we'll be there for you anymore. I think that's my last slide.

Speaker 4  17:02  
Yeah. Okay, so I'm up. So I will say that about three weeks ago, I did have a conversation with Warren, and some of the things that he was going through and how he was dealing with things became incredibly useful for me, because then it started hitting at Duke. And many of you on the who are listening today also are lucky enough to have an engineering school plus a major health system, and that does kind of start things moving quickly. So our engineering school, interestingly, has a fair number of people who are ex industry, so immediately they had put together kind of this response team, and they were very focused on selecting certain projects from where they're getting they were getting input from the health system on, on certain needs. And so they would narrow down the projects based on, you know, what the need was, what other products were out there, what they could do, how they could do the design. And they started ramping up a number of projects. And they've, they've kind of turned into two types of med device projects, one that I would call, well, open source, where we're just saying, Duke has a disinfectant procedure for the N 95 mass open source. We just have a disclaimer. We have some face shields, again, some of these things we're just going to send out. And then we have another set of types of devices that are patentable. And at least at this point, like like Oren says, We've chosen to go ahead and patent them, but again, to do a different kind of license. So next slide. So the first thing that is coming out, and actually went public today, is there are many of you know, orthopedic surgeons have, when they're doing orthopedic surgery, they have a certain hood on. Well, our guys have converted that hood that has a certain manufacturer unnamed, converting that hood to it can become a paper hood. And many of us now know all sorts of terms that we never knew before, pepper and 95 all sorts of stuff. So this hood has now been with the right designs can be converted so that it can be used as a paper hood, the design we went public this morning. We've already had 40 requests for licenses from around the world, Newfoundland, New Zealand, South Africa, and many different hospitals in the US. We have started with orange license. We have a non exclusive license up and running. You know, we've worked our way through. How do we get the designs out? And off we go. And then there's some other devices, as you might expect, that are in the mill. We have little widgets that we can help the VA hospital. Tools, because they have some outdated devices, and it helps them connect some of these outdated devices to new pumps. We, like everybody, have face shields, a variety of things like that next slide. But at the same time, we also realized that we had a faculty member who was was working, and has been working on a drug that's been out for a while that could be used as kind of a prophylaxis for COVID 19, and he geared up, in a big way, to start developing a variety of formulations for this drug, because this drug is very difficult to it's not very soluble. It's always been a formulation problem. We started working with clinicians at the health system, putting together the protocols pre ind so we can start talking to FDA, and have started having initial discussions with with company partners. But it's been full speed ahead next slide.

Unknown Speaker  21:08  
So you know,

Speaker 4  21:09  
what have we learned so far in terms of lessons? And I think Oren said it very well, this is no time for traditional processes. And you also find out really quickly, who at your institution is going to be creative and kind of get through the muck, and also who at your institution is is is going to say, Nope, there's a process, and we have to do it this way. And you find who you want to work with, like Oren says, and this is a quote from an email I got a couple days ago. We are right in the middle of it, because there really isn't any other entity at the university that knows all these groups, from Regulatory Affairs to, of course, the faculty to alumni groups to risk management and, of course, to General Counsel. You know, we know everybody, so we have the ability to kind of coordinate. It's exhausting, but it you know, we can do it like Oren says, you use your Rolodex. You can also use your alumni office or your development office. We've been very fortunate these companies, especially pharma, they are drowning in people reaching out to them with every idea known to man. And because we had alumni in some high places, we've been able to just jump over that hoop and get into higher level discussions, in particular for the drug purposing and some of the vaccine manufacturing that we have. Again, I can't stress enough, your office of counsel can be your best friend. And these poor people, they're not used to doing some of the kinds of disclaimer language or looking at things like emergency use authorizations, FDA approval these kinds of things, and running around trying to figure out new language for force majeure and things like that. But they have really stepped up. My wing man is a fellow by name of Scott ellengold, and literally, there's no way we could have done this without them. Regulatory folks, your regulatory folks are also drowning because every clinician, every engineer, has got another idea, and everybody's trying to push it through and find out what the best you know FDA process is, and so trying to get them to help is it's hard. I feel for them, like we've said, the processes. I mean, we're just trying to get in front of people worry about the NDAs later and the detailed processes, and just speeding everything up, I mean, and like Oren says, It's just much faster than we're worst used to doing. And then also setting up websites. We set up our own website sort of instantaneously. Our website wasn't necessarily set up for click wrap licenses and things like that, so we've had to do some kludgy ways of getting these licenses signed, then sending out the designs. I had kind of an amusing around of emails with Oren over the weekend trying to figure out box and how do we get these designs out? So everybody's really trying to pitch in and do these things quickly, but that's sort of the lessons we've learned so far, and that's pretty much the end for me right now. Next.

Unknown Speaker  24:39  
Thanks. Robin Phil Licari here, I am stunned, I guess, not surprised, but I the commonality with with Columbia and Duke Partners is a is an accurate system of academic medical centers as well as as hospitals, but with close University affiliations, and we're seeing very similar to. A very similar challenges it has turned out, and I like the term Robin used, being in the middle. We're in the middle. And when you really take a step back, you realize we're supporting the research infrastructure just the way we always do, but in a very different dynamic. This slide was one of our early concept slides as to how our Mass General Brigham Center for COVID innovation started to has started to form. It started about two and a half to three weeks ago. And I highlighted the four major work groups, device diagnostics, therapeutics and digital health. All have started, device in the in the is most mature, just given the challenges with PPE and when we reflected what the innovation office could do to support we had the good fortune of having a handful of relatively senior X industry people who are part of our team and part of our licensing and tech, tech transfer effort already. Who could really bring to bear not only the Rolodex, as has already been mentioned, but also knowledge around some of the areas that we were supporting? I would also say that the speed with which folks are moving lends itself incredibly, incredible importance to the project and process management dialog, these will not get to fruition if we don't have some kind of project structure, but of course, one that moves in a really nimble way, and the Rolodex, I can only reinforce that message to pull on the people who, for the most part, have been great in terms of offering their services, almost always without ask for compensation on the outside, which is has been great. And how do we operationalize? And then, like the other speakers, IP assessment and really contracting has become, while it's in the background, it's become kind of second priority to the you can see in the upper right how we have started to structure, or have structured our device working groups, predominantly around PPE. We had a reuse group that was separate for for our mask efforts, the N 95 in particular, we had new mask designs, which was a separate group, and you can see some of the others. We had a couple of matrix groups. So one was around validation and in how, how can we support with validation understanding our researchers who are turning lots of new ideas out as we go forward and validation is probably an overuse of the word. It's more of a verification given the speed with which we're moving, as opposed to something that would meet the definition of an FDA validation. So pull together within these in support of these four teams. Next slide please, on the whole role that we find ourselves playing, and this is a careful one. It's one that has been has been alluded to, and that is this notion of risk assessment. All of you who have been part of or interfaced with companies, who who have licensed your your inventions, often that risk assessment from the user perspective is key to the whole development process and FDA verification. This is something that we are we are providing, but in a very rapid and unconventional way, the best we can, we cannot slow down the train, but at the same time, it's important to make sure that multitudes of of inventions don't move to the point of fruition if they're not ready, and and the fact that they don't meet patients or clinicians until until we've got the verifications and or the emergency use authorization that FDA can provide it. So we've played a big role in the risk, risk management side. Next slide, please. So the other element that we continue to challenge ourselves with is this, is this notion of timeliness, and that is, how do we take literally design groups counted in the 1000s of engineers and researchers. If you go across all four of our work streams, we have over 1000 participants. And then how do you begin to call down the opportunities and time to clinical readiness that third column from the left has become critical for us. We're going to treat something that is implementable in one to three weeks, similar to what I heard my colleagues talk about in terms of their inventions, quite different than one that's going to take a couple of months, and it allows us to to help with the risk assessment and how deep we go. And this was a just a straw man around how could we think about prioritizing project? And while the structure did not survive the the philosophy has a timing doesn't solve the problem. Are we going to get stakeholder buy in and as we as we went forward from there, it helps us decide where our priorities should be. So that time element becomes extremely important, and it's also why. I'll stop and I'll stay on this slide for a moment. It's also why the reuse group took on really the most urgency, because it was going to be our fastest method, as I'm sure many of you have found as well, to get to the n 95 issue solved, whether it was a sourcing interaction, which is incredibly difficult for our sourcing partners. I know you're all seeing in your institutions as well. They're working their tails off to try to find new supply, and it has become extremely difficult. What we were able to do, however, is the reuse team was with a group of several 100 researchers, was simultaneously verifying a variety of sterilization techniques, and independently, had arrived at what their preferred was for the N 95 was a vaporized hydrogen peroxide. There were a couple of second second runners up, but vaporized hydrogen peroxide became the preferred and we had the good fortune. In fact, the first time I was on a call with with Oren. In fact, was Sunday the 29th the same day we started talking to Battelle, and some of you who are following the reuse model that Patel is following. We actually had our first calls with Battelle that Sunday. We had an agreement signed by Monday evening, and we actually took receipt of our our Battelle modules a week ago Sunday. So we ran our first batches this week, and I can only tell you that the critical area where the innovation office has come in is once we had the technical verification from our research colleagues, it was then up to us to us to put the commercial arrangements together, and then the opera, the operating plan in each of the hospitals, as well as transportation. So as Oren and Robin both alluded to, we had to put on different hats. But there we were in the middle. And in fact, our first three institutions are processing as of Friday night, and we're bringing on about another institute, another dozen institutions, in the next few business days. So it it is a new environment. The way this will make us a bit more secure. Our n 95 is as much as high yield as we possibly can get through the decontaminated mass return back to the institutions, and then hopefully relieve a little bit of pressure on the new supply as we go forward, I'll yield the floor there and let Rick Take it.

Speaker 3  32:33  
Thanks. Well, just like the previous speakers, we've had a lot of busy three four weeks here with our tech transfer team, doing both the normal tech transfer activities, but also really being either all hands on deck or all hands on standby for any of the various University projects that are happening related to COVID 19. I've lost track of exactly how many we're tracking, and we're not tracking every single one, some of them lighter, lighter than others, but near 50 at least, of projects, and probably another 25 or so that we're not tracking, and they're all over the map, just like everybody else said. We we have the diagnostics and PPEs, ventilators, some treatments, you know, where they repurpose compounds or methods, some clinical trials, digital health epidemiology models and social media apps. So it's really been all over the map. And then if anybody has seen any kind of media, TV or otherwise lately, you've probably seen our Michael Osterholm from University of Minnesota, he's quite frequent on many of the national shows, so we've had a pretty good presence for the university. The next slide, one of the projects I wanted to spend a couple of examples. The first example is on our ventilator project, and it got some early on press as a MacGyver project, and basically one of the university doctors had an anesthesiologist partnered with our medical advice center, and was looking at the opportunity in a critical situation or dire situation, when, when areas would run out of ventilators, what are some other alternatives? And he had experience with the hand operated Ambu resuscitator bag and mask and and looked at a way to automate that. And so that was kind of the very simple design criteria. And if you look at that picture in the upper left, yes, that is a red toolbox. And so during that process, you know, they kind of went from from prototype one to prototype three over a weekend, and basically their goal was to have an open design and partner with all did a lot of early marketing, if you will, even created a video. They had one of the students create a video fairly early, and got lots and lots of interest from from partners, from parts supplier. Dollars from different medical facilities, as well as some large commercial partners we had in the Twin Cities, there's lots of medical, large medical device companies, and so we had some keen interest from three of them. And we can name them because they were actually some of them had done press, so Boston Scientific Medtronic, United Health Group, and so certainly, having the weight of of the big names made a big difference. We pursued a startup for just a short period of time, just because of some of the complexities in producing actual materials. There was a time at which our Medical Device Center actually wanted to be producing these with students, possibly even using the football stadium to assemble them, was kind of a little bit of a humorous story for those in tech transfer. But you know, we're going to be getting in the middle of a lot of the things others described, or in among them that you know really are foreign to a university and certainly to a tech transfer office, from supply chain to to lots of other things. And so we decided, after a point in time when one of the medical device companies stepped up to take the lead, that we would partner with them and kind of put our manufacturing delivery eggs in that basket. And so the university did kick off the the EUA process with the FDA, and it's been obviously very fluid in the various different areas, certainly in the ventilator space. And, you know, I think there's, there's been both a lot of work on the FDA side, but really partnering to evolve to a design that can, can be manufactured consistently, because that's obviously what you need with the FDA processes. Lots of legal work. We actually work both on a contributor we had many, many people wanting to help with parts supplies, but also working on our agreement to allow the openly, freely available. I sometimes feel like it's harder to give something away for free than to license it. But be that, as it may we, we are very close to being able to post that. One of the reasons interesting, the reasons that we're holding up on it, is actually supply chain. And you know, the ventilators have a few moving parts, one of them being motors. We released it quickly to two adopters, two manufacturing adopters, one of the large companies, and then one of a small company in a neighboring state, and quickly, by releasing it to the second company, they caused supply chain issues for the first company by taking the motors that were needed for the second company. So that was kind of an interesting thing that we hadn't anticipated. So one of the reasons we're holding it is not that the license isn't ready, but, you know, we kind of want to wait for the EUA process to complete, but also because of supply chain issues. So that's been kind of an interesting story. We thought a lot about the product naming and project naming, but since the university is not manufacturing it, we felt doing any kind of cute little name would would just detract from the whole effort. We've got a code name that can be used in all the FDA processes, of thinking that others will adopt the code name just to chain the FDA or the EUA with each other, but basically step stepping away from the trademarking aspects, and then really trying to understand, when a licensee picks us up, what are their requirements? Obviously, FDA is going to step in and and take the take the lead on exactly approving those. But you know, what is our relationship with all of the different manufacturers as they go through that EUA process? Next slide, the second example, and I don't think we've had any of them yet in this webinar, is, is really more of a digital digital health, a more concerned with kind of this, the software aspects of it, and it's kind of a data model example, and our office in the tech transfer world has been well regarded and having some expertise in this area. But this one kind of had a different Genesis. This emanated with a contract with the state of Minnesota through the Department of Health, and they partnered with our School of Public Health and a couple of epidemiologists to put together a model, and there was a contract associated with that, and there were a few things within that contract. Each of the states certainly has used a lot of public data, but they have a few assumptions that they're holding a little tight to their best, because without a lot of good context, people can use these assumptions and and use them for the wrong purposes, to make the wrong kind of conjectures. And so there was a contract included some terms of not being able to release any of those kind of pieces of data for 30 days. Yet the tools that we're using for the modeling at the university required that everything be published open source, so we won't be giving a quiz on that the formulas down on the bottom left, but it was a fairly complex endeavor, and in the end of the day, we decided to partner with the state and actually give them the. Ability to do the public relations, to give the exposure, and you know, like most of the most of the time, when you see formulas and graphs like this, these would make great papers and great publications for researchers. Again, that was not the first and foremost on their mind. They felt, actually getting the publicity through the state, through the modeling that the state has done is plenty of credit and and they've they've forego any any publishing aspirations, certainly the requests that have come in, if any of you can imagine, there's a lot of political motivations for people to look at these different models. And that's that's something that we've had to deal with a little bit. But again, having it publicized in the Pioneer Press, which is one of the two publications in the newspaper publications in the Twin Cities, did a nice piece on Saturday or Sunday that really kind of laid out everything about it. And the state is of Minnesota has been good about publicizing it. It kind of took the burden off the university, but it was very interesting just to see the evolution of that model and kind of some of the pressures last slide.

Speaker 3  41:10  
So just some of our observations are done with everybody else, but one of them, I think that's unique, is the University of Minnesota is a land grant university, and some of you aren't necessarily familiar with that, but the original motivations for land grant were to teach agriculture and military tactics, mechanics and classical studies for the working class. But kind of the revised mission of a land grant is to support the state of Minnesota, in our case, for research, teaching and the public good. And so we actually feel that this a lot of the work that we're doing. It's not just for the state, as the previous example was, but it certainly can, can be used to benefit the state, and we believe that that's a big part of it. And I think the Board of Regents, in our case, some of your board of trustees, have recognized this as one of the aspects. And so it really gets kind of the next bullet we don't money, is not the first issue with with with our efforts right now, and we don't want to let the money or the patent get in the way. Very early on, our office published an internal set of guidelines that everybody in our office could use. And I guess I'd recommend that too, is just what's the approach that when you're speaking with faculty regarding the the published now, or go, go public now and and patent later. For, for instance, if you want to get us rights those, those are still maintained, if patentings of interest. But in most cases, let's just get it out there and, and let's not make the patenting decisions get in the way of of getting the the quick time to market. It's actually good that we have many trained researchers, if you want to call them, that that will contact our office first before talking to people. But even in those cases, we want to be very quick to respond. As many people have noted, your Rolodex or your LinkedIn becomes very, very useful. We have a large business advisory group that we use to to help with our startups and many of our other technologies. It's over 350 people. And so what we basically have is we can, we can email out requests to them, and then they have contacts in their own LinkedIn. So you can imagine a pretty large network that we deal with just to make those connections, like the previous panelists mentioned, and then large percentage of our office are from industry, and many of them are using industry contacts that they previous had that this Ambu bag ventilator that we talked about earlier, one of our licensing officers that actually had done a couple of deals with Ambu the company, and so that really came in handy when we were trying to make those kind of relationships. The air traffic control is just a metaphor we've been using. I think it's it's jumping in proactively to kind of make all those connections and take the lead when we need to. Phil mentioned the the project management aspects, I think that's really important again, just right sizing all those efforts and trying to really optimize the time for the most critical resources, which in most cases are the researchers. And I think that's a big role that we played. We found that a lot of the companies, the competitors, are working with each other, the non disclosures don't matter. They just want to use the best minds and best people to save human lives. We saw one case where we had the regulatory people from three different companies kind of debating the best strategy to apply for an EUA. And it was really enriching discussion. We had, kind of the expert from three different companies all contributing. So that was really helpful. The internal boundaries. There's there's less turf wars, I would say there's not zero, but a lot less. And I think that people aren't worried as much about publications, and certainly about patenting, and a lot of times you're just happy for somebody to make a decision. Oftentimes, in a university, you can have people waiting for somebody else to make the decisions, and now I think they're just happy to get a decision made. I think that's been very helpful. We've had a few challenges to the medical school. Like everybody else has a medical medical school. Oftentimes, everybody has to check with the medical school, or they're in on every single project. And in many cases, we're just trying to figure out a way to limit the number of times we have to ask them and only have them involved in the critical decisions when there isn't anybody else that can make those decisions. And then finally, I think, like everybody else says, our office for general counsel has certainly been extremely helpful, but we've wanted to also use as much of our previous knowledge and previous working knowledge on legal language that they've used in the past, so that we don't have to ask them for every single question. And certainly, if there are non COVID 19 projects which are still continuing, we're trying not to bother them at all on those so that was my last last comment, and I guess I would turn it over. I don't know if, Oren, if you wanted to make a comment, or Robin,

Speaker 2  45:59  
I only had, I had a few thoughts that came one way that I that I didn't really want to put on the slide anyway, but some other learnings that I thought were interesting from we've definitely seen. The first one is this was definitely highlighting the difference between good design and good science on one hand, and what the customer wants today on the other side. So we had various people working on different designs for face shields, and the first one that got selected was one of the earlier iterations, but it was a team that basically said, I'm okay freezing the design where we are, because the customers need it today. The Doctors need it today. Meanwhile, we had other teams that sort of kept iterating and iterating and iterating and used good design principles and doing all the notes and getting doing the, you know, lean Launch Pad stuff that we teach, like we teach 100 interviews, get out of the building, go talk to your customers, and that's all well and good when you've got three months to do that. But in this case, as soon as the first hospital said we want that, we started making them, and we had other places that were, you know, when we then would show the designs around to other hospitals, they'd say, Well, this design kind of looks better, but that one is what someone else bought. So I'll just take the one that someone else bought, because then it's a lot easier for me to do my diligence. So there's a definite tension between speed and perfect design that came up another thing, I think, to Rick's point, we're definitely, or maybe it was Philip, we're definitely in the middle, but that doesn't mean you got to be in the middle for everything. So what we found was we started to get, once people got used to us solving problems, we started to get invited to every phone call and every internal design meeting, and people wanted input on whether the face shields would be five inches or six inches, or whether one piece is better than two pieces, or, like, what the website should say and what the color should be the font. And like, we had to say, like, look, we're happy to help. But this doesn't mean we should be in the middle for everything. We can't. We just can't. Like, this is already our night job. It can't. It was 2470 we just couldn't do all this stuff. So you can't say no to the whole thing, but you can say no to pieces where you're really not going to add value. And I think that's also hard for tech transfer, because we generally as an industry where people who like to get stuff done and like to make sure that things get done right? And so it's hard to say, like, that's that's really not our decision. Like, this part is, but that part's not. The last part is we are. We have found repeatedly that a lot of the faculty will come to us and say, it's really important that we use open source, we want to use the Creative Commons licensing. And we say, that's fine, but just so you understand, it's got no liability protection, right? Like you can do that, but we as a university can't do that, but if you do do that, it's got no liability protection for you. And then they and then they say, Well, I'm not okay, okay, maybe not, maybe not creative commons. But we definitely want this to be given away for free. But we also may want to do a startup on this next year when COVID passes, and then we go, well, then you can like, that's incompatible with the Creative Commons approach. It's fine if you want to do that, but so there's been a lot of education, and faculty, I think, are more used to process that. They've got more time to think about it, and are more traditional. And this has just been a hard

Speaker 4  49:14  
learning. Do we want to open it up for Q and A here? Yeah,

Speaker 1  49:18  
we have a couple questions already. We have one question, do you think universities that are, I just lost, I'm sorry. Do you think universities that are risk averse to craft clinical use agreements for COVID 19 technologies will likely follow a Darwinian path for their COVID 19 technologies? What are your suggestions for coordinating with legal and overcoming clinical use concerns from general counsels and risk management POV at large academic medical centers.

Speaker 4  49:48  
So having been through this, I would say, interestingly, I'm not so sure our council has been so risk adverse. I think when you start getting into your regulatory groups, your IR. BS and your clinical trials groups, they're not, this is they're not used to this, not at this speed. They're used to thinking, well, they have to be. They're used to thinking everything out and there's certain protocols. So that's been, I think, the most complicated thing for us, in particular, for the drugs, for the devices, there's a variety of, you know, disclaimers and things like that. But for the drugs and the other things, you know, you're and this has been fun for me. You're balancing the faculty member. And I'm sure we've all heard this, people are dying. What's wrong with these people in the med school? And having to explain to them, you know, they're still going to have to go to the the FDA, they're still going to have to write a protocol. They're still going to have to have a pre ind meeting. Well, what's taken them so long? Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Why are they taking so long to write these protocols and recognizing that these poor regulatory people are drowning in these kinds of things? So I think that's been a really hard thing for some of our faculty to kind of understand the time it takes to do this. And then also, come on, let's, let's talk to these companies. Let's set this up. What's taking so long? And then while, like Oren says, you're working all night, you're doing it as fast as you can. But oh my gosh, it's, it's, um, it's crazy in terms of how fast everything is going

Unknown Speaker  51:20  
I would also add to Robin's point, you know, the in the device world, the EUA, is relatively unknown mechanism, and I think that FDA, while they're there, their decision horizons are getting shorter. As this thing continues to go on. There's still a need for some basic data, and it isn't always clear how much they've insisted on the verification routines. They try to publish guidance. They're updating guidance relatively, relatively frequently. But we're also at the point where our OGC is being asked, well, do we need to wait for the EUA? Are there? Are there, in fact, situations where we can go forward on a on a patient with without a UA, and that becomes extremely difficult for folks to understand. You know, I like Rick's description of having some med device companies behind these initiatives. We're seeing a lot of folks that are being very entrepreneurial, but working with companies who've never had the structure of a medical device quality system, and that's a real difficult thing. When you have to put together an emergency use authorization, you don't have some of the quality system fundamentals. So it's, it's, it's an it's a new frontier, and all of these new mechanisms we're learning from, I would agree, our OGC has also gotten very helpful in terms of getting us outside guidance when we need to so very, very different decision making horizons than we've seen in the past. And you

Speaker 4  52:50  
hear that great sentence that used to strike terror in your least for me, well, we're going to do some research on that, but I got to say Council, he must be doing it all night, because he's will come back and say, Okay, here's the language you can have. Let's use this. Let's go. So in the past, that would have meant, you know, who knows how long? Yes, yeah.

Unknown Speaker  53:23  
Okay, okay, reading some of the questions.

Speaker 1  53:26  
I have an emailed question, actually. How did you convince a question for Rick, how did you convince the makerspace groups on campus to not try to set up manufacturing directly on campus?

Speaker 3  53:40  
I think part of the the expectation was the quantities that we were talking about, and, you know, also some of the quality systems that were just mentioned, too, and just, you know, kind of understanding what was all required if they were just going to build, let's just say, 25 different prototypes. Sure, the on campus maker spaces might be able to accommodate that, but when you're talking about 1000s and having to manage and assemble those, we just felt that going with a manufacturer, somebody that could maybe shut down one of their existing product lines, which many of them have, and ramp it up to manufacture a device. You're looking at companies that have much more wherewithal, much more capacity, and have those quality systems in place. And so I think it really wasn't those in the maker spaces. I think it was some of the people that have worked on the original prototypes themselves that we had to convince and they partner with those same companies that I mentioned, and those same companies have a good research relationship with the university. So I think there was a built in trust. It wasn't three strange companies or companies that they were familiar working with, so they had had the confidence in them.

Speaker 4  54:58  
I. Say we are making things and packaging them up and walking them across to the VA. And no one had really thought about, oh, you might need a material transfer agreement, or some sort of an agreement before you take these things over across the street. Albeit, the plan was to open source the design afterwards. And that's a different kind of material transfer agreement too, because they're going to be used in patients. So, you know, that people hadn't really thought about that aspect of it, and happily, because we're in the middle, you know, we could kind of slow that down just a little bit and get those agreements going for the things that are actually being manufactured on campus.

Speaker 2  55:39  
We also were manufacturing things on campus. I mean, nobody was happy about it, but honestly, again, back to the aforementioned. Like, you know, the alternative is that the doctors are getting infected with Coronavirus like this. So it really, I was, I was blown away by how many people across the university ecosystem said, we will deal with that later, like get the masks into the hospitals and we went. We had the Dean of Engineering and the provost for certifying students and faculty as essential personnel so they could get access to campus. We had security monitoring maker space. When the whole rest of the campus was shut down, the general counsel's office was just letting things fly out the door and we were we did go back and paper over a lot of that later. But by the way, this is probably going to mean that we aren't going to want to release the recording of this webinar. But, but like for God's sakes, it was just the consequences of slowing anything down or saying no to anything in the midst of this crisis are just too big. You know what? We're not going to release. You have a little bit more time, but it's a therapeutic but especially on the PPE or ventilators, like people are dying in real time, and you just, you just can't, we couldn't slow anything down, even for a minute,

Speaker 4  56:59  
and someone had asked a question about interacting with industry stakeholders, and I and Rick, maybe you can answer. I think the companies that we're working with related to the drugs are acting fairly quickly and talking to us, but now we're getting into sort of a little bit of a pedantic what you'd expect process of let's have, you know, NDAs, and let's talk about, you know, details and things like that. So that's going and I think because it has to go that way, because of the nature of the technology versus some of the devices, yeah,

Speaker 3  57:37  
I think, I think you're right. The medical device manufacturers have basically been, just been looking for ways that they they can contribute. I mean, they're, they're, you know, kind of electric elective surgeries, or maybe not so elective surgeries that the number of just surgeries using their devices have have all gone down. They're looking to to, what else can they do? And certainly, you know, the medical device vendors doing something like a ventilator kind of fits. They're a little bit more let's just do this for the stop gap period, not for the long term. But also, we've had a similar experience, Robin. We've got a couple of things that are more in the pharma space and looking for alternate supplies and formulations and that type of thing. And that's been a little bit more of a struggle, still digging through the Rolodex to find the right contacts. But then, you know, if it's a short supply for the University of Minnesota, it's probably short in short supply for other people and and you know, there's, there's feels like a little bit more of a negotiation culture than what we've seen with medical device

Speaker 1  58:42  
companies. I How are you protecting the new design related to mask ventilator that needs to go for contract manufacturing quickly? Are you protecting it through design patent? You've kind of touched on that, but

Speaker 3  58:53  
yeah, we're not, this is not a high end ventilator whatsoever. We're not worried about protecting that. In fact, you can't really protect it. There's many of them out there today. MIT has one. University of Illinois has one. We're not competing in terms of IP. This is all about just filling a gap. So we've not done any patenting at all. We're just assembling copywriters. We've gotten contributors, contributors agreements, from those who kind of supplied pieces and parts. But the idea is to just to make it open and you know, there's no, there's no patents involved.

Speaker 1  59:34  
Okay, I want to be respectful of everyone's time. We do still have a handful of questions coming in. We are at the end of our time, though, is it okay with you the panelists? If I follow up with you on these questions, and we follow up with the individuals that asked a little bit later today,

Speaker 2  59:52  
I mean, I'm okay going for another few minutes on the webinar. If the rest of you guys are, I do have

Unknown Speaker  59:57  
a call I have to get to but yes, if. Anything left at the end, I'd be glad to collaborate on the answers. Okay, I

Unknown Speaker  1:00:04  
have to leave too. I have a four. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker  1:00:07  
Thanks everybody. Thank you,

Speaker 2  1:00:09  
Robin, you dodged the hard question. Do you want me to bring it up? No, it's okay. All right.

Speaker 1  1:00:18  
All right. For those that are remaining, do you want to go ahead and answer some of these questions? Oren,

Speaker 2  1:00:27  
yeah, there was, I think there was, hold on, let me just see what there was a in the chat. There were some questions, what role did the individual groups? Do

Speaker 3  1:00:43  
you? Do you want me to cover that, the open pledge question? Or,

Speaker 2  1:00:47  
boy, do I want you to cover the open pledge question? Rick,

Speaker 3  1:00:50  
okay, so so many of you have, so this is not the answer to the open pledge question, but I can address that. We've, we've had a few different discussions at the different universities. Then we have gotten a little bit of guidance from from autumn. But there's a, basically an industry and an academic program, I think, started in the end of March that was called the the open pledge. There's many of them around COVID, 19 technologies and basically looking at having a very standard, philosophical license in place for all different types of entities to be able to license technologies in a free manner, or a near free manner, and so we will be collectively the autm board is reviewing the various different open source, excuse me, open pledge models, and looking to kind of finalize on a recommendation in the next day or two, and then making a Little bit more broadly available, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, many companies have have signed on to the pledge, and I think most universities are interested in doing so, and we're just waiting for some final guidance that'll either come from AAU or from autumn.

Speaker 2  1:02:15  
Yeah. And I think, you know, there's, there's a lot of different ways to do this. There's the open pledge. There's the sort of Stanford MIT Harvard pledge. There's the autumn pledge that will be coming out. Or, frankly, you know, a lot of us are just doing this and just making it happen. And so I don't know of any university that is waiting for a broad statement of principles before doing good work,

Speaker 3  1:02:44  
right? I think it's just trying to trying to get to a common language. But as you've seen, there's already several different flavors of it, and I think it's most people agree with the concept. It's just a matter of, how does it get operationalized?

Speaker 2  1:03:01  
Were there any other questions that were sort of major questions? I'm sort of trying to skim through the chat.

Speaker 1  1:03:07  
We still have a few in the Q and A What role did you play in the individual groups that were manufacturing and distribution, distributing?

Speaker 2  1:03:17  
So I think Doug, that's from Doug hoch said, I Doug, I think we talked about that early on, but basically, at least at Columbia, we, you know, we helped. Basically, we had to identify as many contract manufacturers as we could. Luckily, there were some personal connections from the engineers who'd worked with various contract manufacturing before. So we then jumped in and got them under CVA, very quickly, shared the designs with them, iterated with them, while they looked at various prototyping methods to get different costs, different thicknesses of material, and then worked, sort of joined the initial few calls with the hospital purchasing managers. The way we did it was basically our click license, the free non x1 year click license goes to the hospitals. So we are licensing our design to the hospitals, and the hospitals are contracting directly with the contract manufacturers to have it made. That's the way we did our we thought that was simplest, because we would work with one, with the big customers, and then they we would connect them to the contract manufacturers we found for the dozens and dozens of downloaded click licenses, which are still again free, non x1 year click licenses, the you know, don't sue us license, we are not connecting all of those individuals with contract manufacturers. We're only doing that for the large hospital systems, because it's just it was just too hard, like we're letting people find their own so it very much depended. We've also then subsequently got contacted by some of the world's largest contract manufacturers and also medical device distributors, similar what Rick was saying, asking if they can get involved. And so then we've. Sent them designs and work with them on pricing, and are now doing sort of customized contracts for them, because some of them want it to be humanitarian use during the crisis, but then commercial use thereafter. So we've had to change the flavors of these. And again, Melissa Cohen from General Counsel's Office, was unbelievable, unbelievably nimble in getting this stuff

Speaker 1  1:05:22  
done. Thanks. Let's see, do the panelists see a need or a role or benefit of TTOs trying to coordinate and prioritize projects from the U community, for the FDA, for example, to review?

Speaker 3  1:05:36  
Well, that's that's a little bit of a challenge, because the the pace of all of the different projects varies quite a bit, and a lot of it depends on whether the university itself is going to go through that process, or if one of its licensees will go through that process. In the one example that I talked about, we actually started the process, even though we may never end up manufacturing them to get that FDA, EUA clearance. We still don't have it, but it's coming any day now, I've been told, but I think the prioritization of projects, it's a little tough for the university to really know how close something is to a final design, whether the the right people at a university can put together one of those packets for the FDA. Who contracts with usually use an outside firm to actually, you know, make the FDA application. So there's a lot of complexities involved, and I wouldn't probably recommend that each university has a a huge list of projects going the going through the FDA, because I think it's, it's both very time consuming and very expensive. But, you know, I think it's going to vary by by project. I don't know if, Oren, if you've had any a lot of FDA applications going through.

Speaker 2  1:07:00  
Not, not yet. No, we are we? I think what we are now trying to backfill for the face shields with one of them, but Erica Moses, if people have specific questions about how the FDA process was handled, email me, and I'll connect you to Erica Moses, who's the person we brought in, who's like a 20 year serial medical device entrepreneur who's been quarterbacking, bless her heart, on this and and I'm happy to ask her to send the questions. I also saw Jen Dyer from from the West Coast, ask the question about how we're fulfilling our by dual obligations. I mean, none of the stuff so far that we've been dealing with in federal funded or, sorry, let me rephrase that, none of the stuff that's like quick PPE solutions that we are not filing patents on have been federally funded. We will certainly make do go through all of our compliance steps. It just sometimes it might be after the fact, I think,

Speaker 3  1:07:54  
non exclusive as well. I mean, there's, there's less on the licensing side that you have to that's your less obligations, too, and it

Speaker 2  1:08:02  
looks like Doug meant, how is our office interacting with the manufacturing and distributing internal teams, not the external teams? So I'll just rephrase the question, basically, usually not much. Like they've been coming to us and saying, you know, we want to some of the teams have said, like, I'm making this stuff in a maker space. I'm gonna go deliver to the hospital. And we've kind of said, thanks for telling us and and if you if you'd like to limit the liability risk, then you could use our click licensing. But if you're hell bent on delivering the stuff tonight, you know we can't give you our official approval to do so, but I'm not going to call the cops and stop you from doing

Speaker 3  1:08:42  
it. One other idea. One other idea I had when you mentioned that the click licensing, some universities don't have click licensing capabilities. We did a couple of where we did email licenses, which basically said by, by accepting this, this these designs, you agree to the following terms, or you agree to the following terms, please acknowledge, and it's not a click license, but it's a precursor to a click license. And basically getting, getting them to affirm by email that they agree to two or three different terms, liability being one of them certainly in in before you have a design finalized, just just so that they can, so a partner can get started prior to having, you know, any agreements in place. So we've, we've done that in a couple of cases where we just said, by by receiving this design, you agree to the following terms, please acknowledge this email.

Speaker 2  1:09:36  
It looks like Ian's asked us a question on how proactive or reactive Are we being in terms of, in terms of trying to scour the campus for these kinds of activities and and I would say, like, are we just waiting for stuff to show up, or are we out there? I think it's the mix. So. My licensing. Our licensing officers are definitely out there talking to the faculty they work with, saying, like, what are you working on? What are you working on? What are you working on? I think again, partially because we're in the center of Bedlam, it really hasn't taken much to I think every faculty member on campus is aware of what's going on, every graduate student, every undergrad the university Columbia was super proactive about putting together a task force across the university leadership to try and coordinate this. And the Provost Office, the VPRS office, our office, the medical center, engineering school, arts and sciences are on very regular calls and meetings to try and keep each other up to date and centralize this listing. So like that list I screenshot you earlier of our list of the COVID related research projects is on the university homepage at this point, and it's constantly being up to date. So Ian, there may be stuff that's slipping through the cracks, but I think it's pretty unlikely at this point, almost everyone as soon as soon as someone talks to their department chair or their dean or their sponsored project person or lawyer, or anyone running any maker space or or anyone at all, really, they're going to say you really should let CTV know about that. And so we're finding about it, finding out about so pretty quickly.

Speaker 1  1:11:22  
Yeah, okay, I think that's it. On the questions right now, if anybody had questions they didn't get a chance to enter in, please feel free to follow up with me, and I'll make sure to get in touch with the panelists. Oren Rick, any parting thoughts?

Speaker 3  1:11:38  
No, I think it's maybe just one real quick when it's just like you anything else we've all been doing in tech transfer, it's all about, you know, sharing. Nobody has the monopoly on good ideas. So just, just keep sharing, and you've got good ideas. Share them.

Speaker 2  1:11:54  
Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of us who were down this toboggan run first, I'm mixing my sports metaphors terribly. A lot of us who were down this toboggan run first learned the hard way and only got through it through the help of our peers. And so if any of us can be helpful to any of you, please don't hesitate to reach out. I'll give you Rick's home number and his and his personal in your own moment. Awesome.

Speaker 1  1:12:17  
Well, on behalf of autumn, I just want to thank our panel for this discussion. I also want to thank all of you for attending. We hope you found this informational and one more. Thank you to our annual webinar sponsor, Marshall Gerstein and Boren. We appreciate the continued support. This will conclude our program for today. Thanks for joining us. Have a great afternoon. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai