- Welcome everyone to Wednesday
Nite @ the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW-Madison Bi
otechnology Center.
I also work for the Division of
Extension
here at UW-Madison,
and on behalf of those folks and
our other co-organizers,
Wisconsin Public Television, Wisc
onsin Alumni Association,
and the UW-Madison Science Alli
ance,
thanks again for coming to Wedn
esday Nite @ the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night,
50 times a year.
Tonight, it's my pleasure to intr
oduce to you Rock Mackie.
He's the chief innovation office
r at UW-Health,
and is a professor emeritus in th
e departments
of Engineering Physics and Me
dical Physics.
He was born in Eston, Saskatchewa
n,
in the Prairie Provinces,
and went to high school in Saskat
oon.
And then he got his undergradu
ate degree
in physics at the University of
Saskatchewan
and then moved a little bit west
to go
to the University of Alberta,
where he got his PhD in physics.
Then he came here to UW-Madison i
n 1987
to be in the Department of M
edical Physics.
And then in 2010 to 2015,
he moved over to the Morgridge
Institute for Research,
and he retired, and then ear
lier this year,
he got pulled out of retirement
to become the chief innovation
officer at UW Health.
Tonight, he's going to talk with
us about something
that's distinguishing here a
t this university
and at many other places,
fueling academic entrepreneurship
.
We've had talks on, great histor
ic talks,
on Steinbach and vitamin D,
and Karl Paul Link and warfarin.
Tonight we get to hear about how
this ship of enterprise sail
s in today's seas.
So please join me in welcoming Ro
ck Mackie
to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you very much.
Thank you, Thomas, it's a pl
easure to be here.
This is a great program,
and I'm honored to be here talki
ng to you.
I'd like to start by dedicatin
g this
to a good friend, Mark Cook.
Probably many of you knew Mark.
He passed away recently.
But Mark was a great scientist, b
ut also,
well, a wonderful human being an
d a great scientist,
but he was also a very good e
ntrepreneur.
And in dedication to him, as he
used to say to me,
he said, "You know, if we co
uld get, if we could harvest
"the crap from a chicken, and ke
ep the chicken alive,
"we'd make more money out of
the chicken crap
"than we would out of killing an
d frying up the chicken."
And he was very interested
in the chemicals that are produce
d.
So in honoring Mark Cook,
I'm going to rename it Fertil
izing Academic Entrepreneurship.
(audience chuckling)
So I of course, part of the
conflict management
at a university, you have to disc
lose your relationships,
so I've had a lot of relationshi
ps
with companies over the year
s, as a consultant,
as a company founder, on boa
rds of companies,
and so I guess this is one talk
in which all of this
is not a threat, but a good thing
.
First of all, I think it's impor
tant to remember
that faculty aren't, are rarely p
urely,
solely, pure professors of a fiel
d
or applied professors of a field
.
Most professors think of themselv
es in some way
as being both, if you like,
basic scientists,
as well as applied scientists.
And it tilts a little bit, the h
umanities,
they tend to think of themselves
as maybe pure basic,
whereas over in agriculture and
medical sciences,
maybe a little bit more pure appl
ied.
But most scientists are somewh
ere in the middle,
and they're equally basic and ap
plied.
So I think it's important to
know that.
We're really talking about what
applied scientists will do,
or applied engineers will do, or
applied faculty will do.
So, it turns out that the main m
otivation
for academic entrepreneurs is not
to make money,
at least that's what they say.
(audience chuckling)
The main factor really is to
see their ideas
actually out in the world and do
ing good.
And that's true in a study and th
is is in 2010,
but it was also true in a earli
er study,
found that non-economic moti
ves tend
to be more important to entrepren
eurs,
or at least academic entreprene
urs, than economic ones.
And the three most important moti
ves are autonomy,
really controlling something full
y yourself,
and the achievement of seeing yo
ur ideas put into practice,
and job satisfaction.
And in my case it was, I became a
n entrepreneur
not because I wanted to make mone
y,
I did it to complete projects,
'cause the projects would've end
ed
if it wasn't passed into a compa
ny.
I want to ask you, and get the au
dience to say,
who are the most entrepreneurial
faculty in a university?
Is it the Business School faculty
?
Is it Life Sciences faculty?
Is it the engineers?
Medical researchers?
Or just completely outside the bo
x, fine arts faculty?
Who are the most entrepreneurial?
- [Man] What's the metric base?
- Well, I mean, are engaged wi
th society
in selling something, I guess,
the most basic. - Number fou
r.
- Well, it turns out,
it's fine arts. (people murmurin
g)
And it turns out that Busine
ss School faculty
are rarely entrepreneurs themselv
es!
Right, and that's because there'
s tremendous pressure
in the Business School, to study
entrepreneurship,
or study business, but they're re
ally discouraged
from getting involved in business
.
And I only know one entrepreneur
in our Business School,
who is a co-founder of an incuba
tor called Generator.
In fact, fine arts faculty are 10
0% entrepreneurs,
now why is that? - Selling concer
ts.
- Well, I mean, it's really basi
c, it's really basic.
Why are they hired, why are they
hired?
Why is a fine arts professor hire
d?
Because they do something that p
eople
find attractive, or the perf
ormance exciting,
so they're already engaged wi
th society as entrepreneurs,
and the best of them, if they wa
nt,
they can become professors and t
each
their craft to their students, ri
ght?
They may have a grant
to pay for the materials for oil
painting,
and they would paint in fron
t of their student,
but that canvas isn't going, sitt
ing on a university wall.
It's going back to their studio
and it's being sold, likely, in t
heir studio.
So by definition, they're engage
d with society,
as artists, and they're enga
ged as well
in teaching art to their student
s.
So there's no such thing as an iv
ory tower artist,
by definition, right?
So the Wisconsin Idea is really
central,
I think, to this campus.
"Never be content until the bene
ficent influence,"
I love that word, beneficent inf
luence,
"of the university reaches every
family in the state."
And the classic one, of course,
is dairy farming.
In about 1880, 1/6 of the wheat
grown in the US
came from Wisconsin,
and Milwaukee was our leading gr
ain port.
Unfortunately, we have pretty
light soil,
and so wheat's hard on soil.
I'm from a wheat-producing area a
s well,
but the soil has a lot more clay,
a lot more substance, and it ca
n tolerate wheat-growing.
And (clearing throat) the UW Sch
ool of Agriculture
began to promote dairy farming
to put fertilizer back into t
he light soil,
and to hold the soil in place.
Henry discovered, or perfecte
d the round grain silo
as we know it, as we see it toda
y.
Babcock developed the butterfat
test,
and pioneering tests for bacteria
led
for practical ways of pasteurizat
ion.
And by 1915, Wisconsin was th
e leading
dairy state in the nation,
producing more butter and fat th
an any other state.
So clearly, the School of Agricu
lture
was deeply engaged in taking idea
s out to the state,
and using them in practical ways
.
Let's take a look at innovation
in terms of measure of R&D,
and this is from a Science articl
e in 2013,
The big blue blob there, and by t
he way, the axes,
the Y axis is the number, is the
number of scientists
and engineers per million people
,
and so up on this axis is mor
e scientists,
and along the X axis, along the
bottom,
the horizontal axis, is the
R&D percent of GDP.
And that big blue blob is the
United States,
sitting at about 2 1/2% of GDP
is research and development.
And you can see, there's almo
st a linear line up there,
the more scientists, the more mon
ey being spent
on research and development
in general.
And the US has been like this for
a long time,
it's been spending about 2 1/2% o
f its GDP,
at least since the '60s,
rising and falling by a few te
nths of a percent.
But what has really changed is t
he proportion
of industry funding, as oppo
sed to US federal funding.
It was once 2/3, during the NASA
period, it was 2/3
of the total R&D spending.
And now it's down
Now it's down to about 20%.
In fact, I went to the data to
complete the last few years,
and you see that that last little
, what looked like a peak,
is actually steadily dropping dow
n to about 20%.
So industry now is where the fede
ral government was,
in terms of research and developm
ent funding,
not the federal government.
So we have to be engaged with
industry,
if we want to get our resear
ch and development done,
scientists and engineers and me
dical researchers
have to engage with industry.
We look at our budget over time,
you'll see the state's suppor
t, by the way,
for the university has dropped fr
om 43%,
just before I came here,
now it's down to
it's now down to about 14, 15%.
You'll notice that there's two
things that have risen here.
The gifts and grants, in other w
ords,
research from the federal govern
ment, as well as industry,
and you'll see also, tuition.
But we all say that tuition has
risen steeply, right?
Because the state has stopped fu
nding us,
but even more so, it's R&D,
it's the research and developmen
t,
and we've been particularly s
uccessful
at this university in doing that.
So the role of academia in ind
ustry is, I think,
much like a mine and a mill.
So ideas tend to come, especially
the breakthrough,
the disruptive ideas, are coming
from academia.
But they need to get implemented
and refined in a company.
And I'd like to say that a mill w
on't last long
if there's no mine, but a mill i
s required, really,
to get the product to market, to
refine the ideas.
So the ingredients for a succ
essful university
is excellent facilities, decent f
unding,
but excellent faculty, staff,
and trainees,
and maybe trainees are the mo
st important.
The better students you have,
the better the science is goi
ng to be.
And the result of that, the
Venn diagram
of putting all that together
in the center,
the union, or sorry, the intersec
tion of that,
are ideas generated.
And the reason that universities
and business are close together
is that ideas is the feedstock
for a successful business.
So there, it's the intersecti
on of ideas,
investment, and excellent manage
ment and staff,
that produce profitable sales.
So that's why industry wants, or
needs, universities.
Especially for new ideas that dis
rupt the marketplace.
Here's the situation in Palo Alto
.
Okay, this is Silicon Valley,
so they have two great universiti
es,
UCSF and Stanford,
they have lots of capital and lo
ts of
especially entrepreneurial manage
ment.
Unfortunately, this is the situat
ion in Wisconsin.
We don't lack ideas.
In fact, if you take the spending
from UCSF and Stanford,
we're very close to the sum of t
hose two.
We don't have capital, or not
much capital,
in fact, when I started here,
we had only one venture capital
firm.
At least in Madison now, we have
four venture capital firms,
that are funding Madison, which
by the way,
is more than Minneapolis.
We actually have more venture ca
pital now here
than Minneapolis for life scienc
es and medicine.
Management isn't bad, right?
We have some great industries,
my field especially,
the second-largest medical device
company in the world
is based in Waukesha, Wisconsin,
General Electric,
and the largest, Medtronic, is i
n Minneapolis.
And of course, we have Epic,
which is the largest healthcare I
T company
in the world in Madison.
So of course, lots of great ideas
,
lots of great applied ideas, wil
l go straight out
to large companies, industry.
And I borrow, the examples here a
re all going to be
from my department, this is Chuc
k Mistretta,
who with Andy Crummy, who be
came the chair of radiology,
developed what's called digital
subtraction angiography.
So you actually took, then,
a picture of the patient without
contrast,
then you took another pictur
e with contrast,
and subtracting the two, you high
lighted the contrast.
And if the contrast is going thro
ugh the vascular system,
you suddenly can see very easily,
at relatively low doses to the p
atient,
all of the vessels very beautif
ully.
And this changed what's called
interventional radiology.
In fact, interventional radiolog
y really didn't exist
until Chuck Mistretta's inve
ntion.
And so, pre-1972,
this was their interventional la
b, very chaotic.
And then the modern C-Arm radiog
raphy system
that could swoop around a patien
t become commonplace,
and this is used to guide, for e
xample,
little wires that are going thro
ugh your vascular system,
for example, for placing a stent
into your heart,
or for unplugging other arteries
,
or for actually going in and det
ermining
sampling and biopsying inside you
.
The CT scanner started to take o
ver this role, too,
and so the interventional suite
is changing.
And all of these inventions were
developed
at the University of Wisconsin, a
nd all licensed,
noncompetitively, to all of the
major companies,
Philips, Siemens, and General El
ectric,
so nonexclusive licenses, and ag
ain,
this university has transformed
this whole field,
in fact, Chuck Mistretta's group.
So in fact, University of Wiscon
sin Medical Physics
department has had a lot of spi
n-offs companies.
The first spin-off was called Lun
ar Corporation.
It was started by Dick Mazess.
Dick Mazess actually wasn't a med
ical physicist,
he was an archeologist, an a
nthropologist,
but he was interested in bone,
and so the founder of medical phy
sics,
John Cameron, hired him,
because of his knowledge of bones
,
'cause he had an idea for
for a bone mineral densitometry s
ystem,
to determine what the density of
your bones are,
so that you could determine
if you were at risk for a fractu
re.
And in fact, it's become a s
tandard thing
as you get older, you get a bone
mineral test.
Lunar Corporation was the first
one
to develop a system for that.
It ended up spinning off companie
s,
Bone Care was a drug company,
in fact Hector DeLuca's Hectorol
was its main selling component.
John Cameron also founded Radiat
ion Measurements, Inc.,
which was a not-for-profit.
John would say, "If I don't need
an investment,
"why would I want to have a for-
profit company,
"when I can just build the compan
y as a not-for-profit?
"I'm still payin' myself!
"And I could pay graduate student
s to work at the company."
And then, when it was sold,
it's now still runnin' in Madison
,
by a company called Sun Nuclear.
He started Medical Physics Publis
hing Corporation,
he donated his money for that.
I started Geometrics,
and I'll tell the story about th
at and TomoTherapy,
but still, the spin-offs come,
there's AIQ is a company
that has just been offered
a Series A financing in town,
and two others in the pipeline.
But what's important to show here
is that spin-off companies, if t
hey're successful,
beget other spin-off companies,
and you then form a nucleus,
an ecosystem.
So my first company was call
ed Geometrics.
We had developed the second ste
reotactic
radiosurgery system in the cou
ntry here,
and we didn't have a treatment pl
anning system,
a planning system that could cal
culate
the radiation dose from stereota
ctic radiosurgery,
and so a very clever young progra
mmer
by the name of Mark Gehring
and I and two others combined
to produce a system that was ope
rating
at the University of Wisconsin,
because at that point in time,
you could write software,
and you didn't have to be FDA-
approved for software.
So this, we
We were treating patients from '8
8
through to 1992, and the FDA sa
id, well,
oh, we tried to give away the sof
tware,
so we actually had a workshop an
d we invited six centers
including Mayo to come and take a
way the software,
and the FDA heard about it and
said,
well, that's fine, but now you
have to get it FDA-approved.
So we went to the hospital, UW H
ealth,
well, UW Hospital then, it w
asn't UW Health,
and said, you know, give us a lit
tle bit of money,
we'll get it FDA-approved and yo
u can sell it,
we'll find some way to sell
it, or get somebody to buy it.
And they weren't interested in t
hat, but they said,
well, but thank you very much,
you've reminded us that you've d
one a great job here,
but the programmers that we hired
who did this,
we have a little bit of a bu
dget cut going on,
and unfortunately we're going
to have to lay those guys off.
So Geometrics was actually,
was taken out of the UW Hospital
and turned into a company.
The chairman of our department,
kicking and screaming,
because he felt it was his compan
y,
it should be his company.
But the university said, well,
we don't have a work-for-hire po
licy.
So the people actually wrote
the code,
the copyright owners owned it.
We weren't stupid, though.
We, we donated,
we pledged to donate back the $3
00,000 it took to write,
the hospital paid for it,
thinking we would never ever
have to pay it up,
but it turned out that Geometric
s was extremely successful.
It was produced--
This is from 1994, fully 3D image
s,
it was excellently designed.
Mark Gehring is a genius at inte
rface,
and still is a local entrepreneur
doing very, very well.
You might've heard of a company
called Propeller Health.
Mark was a founder of Propeller
Health as well.
Well, we built on, again, the tr
eatment planning aspect
was extremely important, but Paul
Reckwerdt and I, who was
Paul was also a co-founder of Ge
ometrics,
we ended up selling Geometrics i
n 1996
to a company that had actually g
iven us
an advance against royalties.
We were so academically inclined
that the only way we knew how
to do business
was to get an advance against ro
yalties like a book deal.
And in '96, the company that
had essentially
advanced us the money was squeez
ing us.
So we ended up selling Geometrics
to that company.
By the way, that company was sold
to Philips,
so it's still operated in Madiso
n.
Geometrics is still part of Phil
ips Medical,
and it's in Fitchburg.
By the way, that company ended up
dominating, until recently,
the whole area of radiation ther
apy treatment planning,
and we estimated about two mi
llion people
have been treated or
have used that planning system
around the world,
for radiation therapy.
Paul and I had an idea for an ad
vanced
radiotherapy machine called Tom
oTherapy,
and these are some of the very,
(clearing throat)
very complicated dose distributio
ns.
So red is a high dose, blue is
low dose on these images.
You can see that we could sort
of sculpt
the radiation dose, and prot
ect normal tissues.
This could never,
this was never done before then.
Conventional radiation therapy, b
lasted it away,
with a couple of fields,
and here we were applying fields
from 360 degrees around the patie
nt.
And the system was called TomoThe
rapy.
It looks like a CT scanner, be
cause it was a CT scanner,
so it was the first machine to a
ctually have
a built-in CT scanner into the m
achine.
This is what it looked like in 2
007,
but it had a genesis, of course,
so this is what it looked like in
2000,
and the backstory here is that
after we sold, or sorry,
before we had sold Geometrics,
we had started working on Tom
oTherapy,
and tried to find a backer for it
, an industrial backer,
and of course, GE, being in o
ur backyard,
was the logical choice.
So GE funded us from 1994 to 199
7,
and unfortunately, they had an ac
cident
where one of the service personne
l
left the machine in an unsafe co
ndition
and it ended up killing a pa
tient in Spain.
And Jack Welch owned General
Electric then,
and they decided to get out
of radiotherapy,
because they were number four, an
d they felt,
well, this TomoTherapy thing look
s interesting,
but we're cutting our losses, we
're getting out.
Had GE continued, I'm sure they
would've gotten
a unit out much earlier,
but this was the prototype base
d on a GE CT scanner.
And this was actually built here
at the University of Wisconsin,
at the Physical Sciences Lab out
in Stoughton,
which is one of the great machin
e shops
owned by a university in the cou
ntry.
I was pretty proud of this.
We moved it into the clinic in 20
01.
You can see the covers weren't
very sophisticated-looking.
The covers were actually done b
y a boat builder,
a local boat builder, and it
was fiberglass,
and it had flotation between two
fiberglass sheets, right?
So it was very quiet, and if it w
as thrown in the lake,
it would float. (audience laughi
ng)
But it looks a little clunky.
We also engaged the vet school,
because they have animals to
treat, too.
We have a radiation therapy prog
ram in our vet school,
and this is one of the patients.
So dogs get sinus tumors,
and so the sinus tumors tend to b
e right between the eyes.
And the conventional way to trea
t it was with two fields,
that could eradicate the tumor,
but the animals would go blind,
100%,
it was a side effect, 100% blind
ness.
We showed that you could get
0% blindness
and still treat the tumor wi
th TomoTherapy.
So it was hugely successful.
In fact, they have a commerci
al TomoTherapy machine
at our vet school, one of two in
the country that do.
The first patient was treated in
2002.
The patient, actually, on the
left.
I'm the cameraman for that photo
.
And the second patient is sho
wn on the right.
This is what TomoTherapy,
you can see in our very clun
ky, early version,
is not nearly as sophisticated
as the commercial version was.
Well, we sold the company,
we suffered the recession like
many young companies,
and it was sold to Accuray.
Accuray still runs the compan
y in Madison,
in fact, they were a California c
ompany
and moved their manufacturing to
Madison.
So it's one of the successes of M
adison, at least,
that you've moved a Silicon Vall
ey company to Madison,
instead of moving the compan
y out of Madison
to Silicon Valley.
After that, I started a company
with Mark Gehring,
and two others, called HealthMyn
e.
And this is a company that is mi
ning data
from medical images, from rad
iology images.
'Cause there's information in the
data,
that the radiologists really, it
's very difficult to see,
things like texture,
exotic mathematical constructs l
ike kurtosis,
and so there's about 500 standard
image-processing metrics that you
can harvest
from the data to characterize dis
ease.
So the idea is to generate infor
mation
that can describe the phenotype
of disease.
So the idea is to do what's ca
lled quantitative imaging,
where you're extracting mathemat
ical metrics out of the
out of the images, use that for d
ecision support,
and then later on, when you
have enough data,
to actually mine it, and not just
mine it to determine,
for example, cohorts of patients
that could respond to this drug
versus another drug,
but to actually go and define dis
ease
in terms of the phenotype of
the image.
Another company that I've worked
on
since I've retired is Asto CT, a
nd again,
I've had a long relationship with
the vet school,
so this was with two vets,
including the Chair of Veter
inary Medicine, Mark Markel,
and the idea was to build, they
came to us and said,
can you build a CT scanner that w
ould scan horse legs,
because horses sleep when they're
standing up,
and we don't have to put them und
er general anesthesia
and put them into a CT scanner to
image the legs.
We'll be able to just scan them
vertically.
We said oh, yeah, that's easy,
we just turn it on the side and
raise it up and down,
and they said, well, you know,
it'd be really nice if you could
turn it 90 degrees
and scan their heads, too.
So anyway, we did it.
And I'll just show you a litt
le video here
of what the unit actually looks l
ike.
This is our unit at the Universi
ty of Wisconsin vet school,
it's the first one, it was instal
led last October.
- A scanner that can scan legs of
horses,
two at a time, or scan the he
ad and neck.
The unit was built with safety in
mind.
In fact, it was built so a horse
actually walks across the unit
and gets to a central pedestal,
and the scanner rises up to scan
two legs at once.
- For diagnosticians like myself,
this is a big step forward,
it's a great step forward for th
e profession,
for the industry, for the animal
s' care,
and it can be done safely and
effectively.
(cheerful music)
- The first day was very excitin
g.
We scanned six horses of various
breeds and sizes.
Of those horses, two of them show
ed
that there was pathology in t
heir legs
that weren't identified on r
adiographs.
The installation and assembly
was completed
mostly on the first day, and by t
he second day,
the unit was up and running.
It has rotation speeds of onc
e per second,
giving you 36 slices per second,
and the fan-beam CT that is on b
oard,
allows then accurate reconstructi
ons,
even if there's slight motion
of the horse,
like swaying, as it's sleeping a
nd standing up.
- [Carl] We've been waiting
a long time for-- - Anyway, you
can see
what the unit's about.
So that scanner, again,
was built with absolutely looking
at the requirements for what hor
ses do,
including fertilize the grou
nd around them,
so it's the first CT scanner tha
t's
fully sealed (laughs) as well.
(audience chuckling)
Humans don't do that to scanners
,
but horses certainly don't care.
(audience laughing)
So another company that we starte
d
is a company called OnLume,
and fluorescence guided surg
ery is something
that's starting to be used, and
the trouble is,
to see the weak fluorescent sign
al from markers,
either vascular markers or t
umor markers,
you have to turn out the lights.
And surgical suites with the lig
hts out
aren't a very safe place.
So we developed a lighting syste
m
so that you could capture the fl
uorescent glow
with the lights off.
And it was actually a very simpl
e idea.
What you do is, most of the time
the lights are off,
but high-performance, very brigh
t lights,
come on for a very short period o
f time,
5 or 10% of the time.
90 or 95% of the time, the li
ghts are off,
but that's repeated at 180 hertz
.
So from the human eye,
it looks like the light is n
ice and steady,
but a high-speed camera, imaging
it,
sees the white light signal and
the fluorescent signal.
And most of the time,
we want to capture the weak fluor
escent signal,
and so this is our solution.
This system is under
FDA approval process now.
It's pending FDA approval,
and so hopefully it'll be approve
d.
The contract manufacturer is i
n Waukesha, Wisconsin,
and so it's helping the state.
So I'm going to just show you an
other little movie, here.
This is the green, this is a
false color green,
from the fluorescent signal,
and a surgeon is actually cutting
out,
under good and well-lit cond
itions, the tumor.
And so you can see how useful th
is would be to a surgeon.
You can also see a little green d
ot
down in the lower part, here,
just to the right of that arrow,
that shows that there's another
location for the tumor.
And it will,
again, this cart was designed
and built for us in Waukesha,
and the imaging head will be manu
factured
by Standard Imaging, a medical
physics startup company
that's in the west side of Madiso
n.
So I've talked about both large c
ompanies
taking technology and licensing
it to large companies,
and startup companies,
and it really depends on whethe
r there's a risk,
a high risk or a low risk profil
e for the technology,
and whether or not you're going t
o make
a lot of money or not out of
the technology.
So down in this quadrant is the
low risk, low reward.
So this is a noodle splash preve
nter.
Not much risk in taking this
to market,
but you're probably not going to
make a lot of money.
(audience chuckling)
Whoops, this is the high ris
k, low reward.
This is left to governments,
so you don't want to be in t
his sector at all,
no companies should exist in thi
s sector.
This is like Chuck Mistretta's,
this is digital subtraction angi
ography.
This is a low risk, high reward,
so it's crazy to not give this
to an existing company, right?
Because then, you will not have a
ny business risk,
presumably, and the company
will accept it
because it's a high reward.
This is where TomoTherapy was,
it's high risk, high reward.
But you know, again,
the people who developed this tec
hnology, us,
we understood the risks a lot be
tter than the industry,
so GE got rid of it and left it
to us,
basically, so it was an opportuni
ty.
Again, we wouldn't have star
ted TomoTherapy
as a company, if GE had kept it.
So this is the high risk, high r
eward,
is the place for startups, an
d the low risk, high reward,
is the place for existing compani
es.
So now let me switch gears a litt
le bit
and talk about the issues involve
d in,
I call it potential conflict of,
I like this cartoon,
"We've come up with a new drug t
o combat greed,
"but it's $90 per pill." (audienc
e chuckling)
So my relationship between the
university is managed
by the UW Conflict of Interest C
ommittee.
I hate the word Conflict of Inter
est Committee,
'cause doesn't it imply that ther
e's somethin' wrong?
That you're doin' somethin' wron
g?
It should be called Conflict M
anagement,
'cause there's no human endeavor
involving two people
there's not a potential conflict
,
and it's about managing that
conflict, right?
Anyway, what's good for the comp
any
is not necessarily good for the
UW and vice versa.
And disclosure of the financial
situation's
the first requirement.
So I disclosed the companies I wa
s associated with
at the beginning of the talk,
and all my publications where th
ere's a nexus of interest,
I disclose, so that people can ju
dge for themselves
whether or not there's bias.
There's some absolute don'ts.
Be responsible for a clinical tri
al
involving the company's products
,
and the word's responsible, I mea
n,
the inventor should always be in
volved
in the design of the trial,
but it's the execution of the
trial,
it's picking the patients,
it's writing the results, it's w
riting the paper,
where that person shouldn't
be in charge.
Be responsible for both ends
of a contract.
And I would say you shouldn't ev
en be
involved in one end of the contr
act,
but sometimes that's unavoidable
,
if you're the sole proprietor of
the company.
Force your university staff or s
tudents
to be involved with the company.
By the way, many of my students
were involved with the company,
and I would always say,
"I don't want you to be involved
,
I won't supervise you at the com
pany,
you can go talk to the chairman a
nd convince him
why it's important for your caree
r,
but it's going to take you longer
to get your PhD, okay?
And I'm payin' for your PhD,
if you want to go work for the
company, I'm not going to pay
I'm not going to to pay your
stipend if you're not going to
be working for my project, t
hat's fraud."
But y'know, some students wa
nted to work at the company,
and we would of course acquie
sce to their
to their requests, but me not ma
king the decision.
Limit the rights of the universi
ty's staff or students,
restricting publications, is som
ething that's,
obviously you can't do, because
students have to publish,
they have to get their PhD.
By the way, does anyone see
anything wrong
with those buildings over there?
The third tower doesn't exis
t at WIMR, okay?
I don't know where I got this,
but yeah,
you don't want to misrepresent t
hings.
Commitment management,
I think we should call it con
flict management,
and I like the word commitme
nt management,
and I like this cartoon as well,
I used company resources to
build my own internet company.
Apparently, (chuckles) my low
job satisfaction
bred disloyalty, which drifted in
to outright theft.
(chuckles) And sabotage can'
t be far away.
Well, y'know, clearly, if you wa
nt to start a company,
then you have a potential co
mmitment management problem.
So what you need to do is, if you
're an academic,
is you need to talk to your chair
man or the dean,
or the center director, and get
a formal agreement
of some portion of your time.
And again, if we go back
to the faculty in a fine arts de
partment,
there's a full understanding ther
e
that everyone has a studio,
everyone goes to performances,
where they're getting paid,
and we still haven't quite come t
o that accommodation yet.
And there's some cases we can't,
if you're a brain surgeon here,
if you're a neurosurgeon at th
e University of Wisconsin,
you're workin' all the time on su
rgery.
It's very difficult for you
to get time off,
and probably, you shouldn't, in
a way,
because your skills are so impor
tant.
But by the way, very interesting
,
neurosurgery is one of the most i
nnovative areas
of medicine, and we do have acade
mic entrepreneurs
that have taken time off and
lowered salary,
so that they could be entrepren
eurs.
You must not do business
at your institution's place of b
usiness,
unless it's part of an agreement
between the business and the empl
oyer.
And there's a general acceptance
now
of what's called de minimis use.
So if you, making a local phone
call,
you don't have to run out in the
snowstorm,
on the street corner,
to use a cell phone for a busi
ness call.
You can do that,
if it's not costing the univ
ersity anything,
and if you have a commitment for
some of your time.
'Cause once the university says t
hat you can spend,
say, a day a week on your co
nsulting or on your company,
they're essentially taking t
hat commitment
inside the university, right?
So they're saying, we're taking a
risk
that you're going to be enga
ging with society,
taking your ideas out into the m
arketplace,
and we're okay with that.
Other examples of de minimis u
se is,
if the department's not char
ging for xeroxing,
then why should your company?
If 20% of your time is being devo
ted to the company,
and no one's getting changed for
the research grants
for using the Xerox machine,
or using the blackboard in t
he conference room
when it's not being used.
So de minimis use is generally
accepted.
But when in doubt, the first
obligation's
to your institution.
Well, one of the important factor
s, I think,
especially here, is that y'know,
startup companies
are important for economic healt
h.
And you know what?
We're just about dead last.
This is 2017, we ranked lowe
st in the country
in startup activity.
And startup hubs stimulate econom
ic growth,
it results in better education an
d infrastructure,
and young people gravitate
toward regions of strong startup
activity.
I'm proud to say that TomoTherapy
has been very popular in Wiscons
in.
There's 13 operating TomoTherapy
machines
at most of the cancer centers in
the state.
It's still manufactured by Accura
y, as I mentioned,
they moved their other product li
ne here as well.
They utilize parts suppliers thro
ughout Wisconsin,
and there's 405 centers, about se
ven or 800
TomoTherapy machines operatin
g in the world.
Accuray revealed to me the r
elative spend.
They didn't want to know what the
cost of goods was,
but this is the spend of Accuray
,
for its products in Wisconsin.
31% of their cost of goods comes
from Dane County,
but it's not the biggest, Waukes
ha County, 44%,
and if you add up all the coun
ties around Milwaukee,
about 2/3 of the economic develo
pment from TomoTherapy
is in the counties around Milwau
kee, and why is that?
Well, Milwaukee's still a great
manufacturing hub.
Again, my friend Mark Cook did a
similar thing,
he looked at the impact of UW Agr
icultural spin-offs,
and this is three companies that
came up from CALS,
29 Wisconsin counties benefited
from his spin-off
from agricultural spin-off compa
nies.
And this just shows the three of
them,
including one that Mark started h
imself.
So a few years ago, in fact in th
e period of time
when we were getting a $200 milli
on
budget cut for the system,
the UW-Madison did a budget repor
t
that showed what the overall
economic impact
of the university was, it was abo
ut $15 billion.
And interestingly, the economic o
r
the state and local revenue
from the economic impact was $847
.5 million
coming back to the state coffers,
this is the state coffers,
from the 15 billion spend from t
he university,
and including its spin-offs.
So it turns out that then the u
niversity
was getting from the state 443 mi
llion,
so that's a pretty nice little bu
siness
we got here for the state, right
?
So the university's returning ab
out $1.30
to the state coffers for ever
y dollar spent.
And a lot of that is coming f
rom spin-offs.
The university has 362 startup co
mpanies
that was spun-off, contributing 2
.3 billion.
So 15 billion is the total, incl
uding the startups,
and 2.3 billion is the startups a
lone.
So a university, then, is wise t
o create startups,
economically, for its state.
So a university then can incubate
ideas, in fact,
incubation can be before even a c
ompany is formed.
You could then provide seed fund
ing for the startup.
If you're lucky, that financing
then will happen,
and the company can grow,
and then if all things go in the
right direction,
there's some payback, and in
the case of medical companies,
it's improved healthcare, as wel
l as money,
which goes back to help the commu
nity.
And of course the community's in
volved, often,
in mentorship of the startup comp
anies.
We have a business community that
is very generous
in supplying time.
We also have small business inno
vative research,
the special research and deve
lopment funding
from the federal government.
And that results, ultimately
, in returns,
and very often, donations.
I know almost no academic ent
repreneurs
that've been successful that
haven't generously
donated back to the university.
So my job now in the Isthmus Proj
ect,
and chief innovation officer at U
W Health,
is for medical companies to be in
volved
in incubating ideas and then fin
ding
some seed funding for them,
trying to find community mentors
and helping them find financing.
So the Isthmus Project has a
lot of partners.
We actually have a pretty nice
ecosystem on this campus now.
We have groups like the UW La
w & Entrepreneurship Clinic,
which gives law advice,
it's law interns from the Law Sch
ool,
who are then supervised by p
racticing lawyers,
just like residents in a hospita
l,
but these are lawyers, contracts
and corporation documents.
Discovery to Product, D2P, is a s
uccessful program,
to incubate companies, so sta
rtup companies.
Forward BIO is a program in e
ngineering.
The Center for Technology Commer
cialization
is a statewide organization, was
part of Extension.
And then WiSolve is a group of
postdocs,
it's an independent postdoc
and graduate student organization
,
that provides consulting to start
up companies.
And then there's MERLIN Mentors.
There's a lot of very nice progra
ms to help entrepreneurs.
We have drop-in hours at the
Isthmus Project,
on Mondays and Wednesdays,
to support people who come to us
,
and we get drop-ins saying, we'd
like to figure out,
we've got an idea, would like to
do somethin' with it.
So, examples are,
who knew that we had the leading
surgical coaching group?
This will probably be a not-for-p
rofit
instead of a for-profit, but
still,
adds economic development.
Image processing for outcome anal
ysis,
very similar to HealthMyne in so
me ways,
but clearly different, in a diffe
rent direction.
Continuity of transitional care,
again,
we have a group that basically
teaches health systems
how to properly transition patien
ts from a hospital
back to the home or from the home
into a nursing home.
Traumatic brain injury assessmen
t,
this is something the may be, in
fact,
a joint program between the
athletic department
and UW Health.
I'll just skip a couple, I'll j
ust say one more,
treatment for corneal damage,
so a ophthalmologist came into
my office
and said, "I've got a cure for c
orneal ulcers.
It's a generic drug, it's been
known for a hundred years.
And I need to put that into a
contact lens,
and it can cure corneal ulcers."
And I said, "Oh, you should take
it to WARF."
He said, "Well, I did, but you
know,
it's wasn't new and it wasn't a
composition of matter,
because it was a generic drug, an
d so they passed."
"Oh," I said, "well, that's too b
ad.
Have you talked about it?"
He said, "Well, no, I just got a
patent myself."
And so he actually filed a patent
, and he said,
"But I don't know, I don't have a
clue
of how to start a company."
So who knows, we'll maybe have a
,
and he says it's 80% effective.
Because it's a generic drug,
he can literally put it into eyes
,
he can dilute it and put it into
a dropper
or put it into a vial,
patient puts the drops in their
eyes for two hours,
and 80% of the time, the patient'
s cured of corneal ulcers,
which is debilitating if you hav
e them.
So the two accepted projects
at this point
were helping to work as ProMaps,
and PACT,
and I'll talk about both of 'em.
ProMaps, has anyone ever heard
that physicians are getting burn
t out from their EMR?
(audience murmuring)
Well, Joe Buchanan has a solution
,
so the trouble with electronic h
ealth records is,
they were designed to replac
e paper records.
And the trouble of course with p
aper records is,
the information isn't well-organ
ized.
And it's relatively easy
to flip through paper and find i
nformation,
but it's hard to click through
screens to find information.
And so he's finding a better way
to organize it,
so we're funding that.
ProMaps is short for problem conc
ept maps,
and so a brilliant, brilliant gu
y.
Another extreme--
Another genius, fellow Canadi
an, actually,
Jacques Galipeau is the PI
at the Program for Advanced C
ell Therapy.
So Jacques has got technology,
it's amazing technology.
So what you do is,
transplant patients are immu
ne-suppressed,
by definition, right?
So they can get simple viruses,
viruses that would give you a co
mmon cold or a flu,
will kill patients or force the
physicians
to not have the patient take
the immune,
the immune suppression drugs
in order for their body to f
ight the infection.
But that results in the loss
of the organ,
or in a bone marrow transplant,
a near-death condition.
So Jacques does the same thing
that you would do
for the original bone marrow tra
nsplant donor,
or for the organ donor,
he goes and finds,
he goes and finds relatives, it t
ends to be relatives,
of the patient,
sons and daughters, or brothe
rs and sisters,
who have a similar genetic,
a similar immune
what's it called, Dave, help me.
In other words, a match donor,
and just extracts blood from 'em
.
And he can go and find the T-cel
l,
the white blood cell,
that carries that particular
viral antibody, right,
and these are very common disease
s,
so y'know, the one he's working o
n
is cytomegalovirus, first, CMV.
50% of people have antibodies to
CMV.
He finds those cells that are ex
pressing the antibodies,
grows 'em up to 25,000 cells per
kilogram body weight,
and inject it into the patien
t who's fighting
that viral infection, and it
's very specific,
it just goes after the virus,
but doesn't bring the immune sys
tem up
to full competency, right?
And it works about 80 to 90% of t
he time, fantastic.
So that's the kind of technology
we're going to try to spin o
ut as a company.
So how could the academic entrepr
eneurial
climate be improved?
Well, here's some examples, idea
s.
Encourage domain-specific busine
ss
and entrepreneurial training cla
sses,
develop incubator programs for pr
omising technologies,
get approved faculty commitme
nt to entrepreneurial,
brings responsibilities for fair
ness and openness.
So I think y'know, once a entrepr
eneur
is approved to work on their
company inside the university,
then the university should be re
ally getting behind them,
I think, because after all,
in most cases their salary i
sn't changing.
And the university's taking some
responsibility,
and some risk, if you like,
in hope of a reward for society.
What's very important is bean-co
unting.
So deans, chairs, and center dir
ectors
should report the startup metric
s
for the chancellor or president.
And by the way, in the memo that
would go to them,
it would say that startups are a
good thing,
not a bad thing, you might have t
o tell 'em that.
Rationalize conflict management p
rotocols,
and again, I like the word confl
ict management,
and just make them so that one c
an operate
in the same way as you would
for a grant.
Engage alumni to create a seed
fund for startup companies.
We don't have a university seed
fund through our foundation,
and that's their policy, and that
's fine,
but I think we need to create one
,
'cause I think there's good i
nvestments here,
and I think the alumni would
like to have
what I would call at least a thre
e-way return,
a return on investment, a re
turn to help the university,
and a return to help their commun
ity.
And I think we should just d
eclare ourselves
an entrepreneurial university.
And other universities have,
and I really like this definitio
n
of an entrepreneurial university
from a small university in De
nmark.
It's a knowledge-generating and
culture-bearing institution
that contributes to technologica
l, economic, social,
and cultural innovation in the su
rrounding society,
through entrepreneurship and the
communication
and exchange of knowledge.
Doesn't that sounds like the Wis
consin Idea?
(audience chuckling)
So some take-away thoughts,
we need to reverse Wisconsin's
poor startup performance
by facing the problem broadly.
Wisconsin's business economy shou
ld be more vibrant.
It's all about jobs, every electi
on here,
it's about jobs, jobs, and jobs.
It's analogous to soil deplet
ion of the 1880s.
It's now time to add some fer
tilizer to both
(audience chuckling) existing and
new companies.
And entrepreneurialism excite
s millennials,
and we need to keep our young pe
ople in the state.
In fact, I think entrepreneurship
classes
should be the new English 101 th
at's taught universally.
And I think students would come h
ere,
the best students would come her
e if we did that.
So we should declare ourselves
an entrepreneurial university,
and add economic development to t
he complementary missions
of education, research, and
community service.
So thank you very much!
(audience applauding)