Compared to his colleagues at the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) — a $500 million academic and industry collaboration to fight carbon emissions with bio-energy — Mitchell Altschuler’s job could sound a little dry. While EBI’s researchers out of the labs of UC Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Lawrence Berkeley National are using funds from oil giant BP to investigate new ways of producing biofuels, Altschuler spends his time aiding those scientists in filing patents and advising them on issues of intellectual property.
But anyone familiar with the money-making side of technology knows that Altschuler job, as EBI’s Intellectual Property Manager, is fundamental to the organization’s workings. Altschuler, who previously managed IP for Cargill for three years, works with the group’s hundreds of faculty and student researchers to get EBI’s valuable innovations patented, ensure that critical information isn’t disclosed too soon in research papers, and most importantly, he says, “help professors move forward with as little interruptions as possible.”
IP management is what will eventually help generate funds from the research, and is the reason UK oil giant BP has jumped on board. BP is eligible to license the technology, mostly in non-exclusive agreements, but in certain cases exclusive agreements, Altschuler says. BP’s early access to any breakthrough innovation at EBI could give it a leg up in the competitive world of fuel, and the public/private initiative is just one of BP’s biofuel investments.
Other BP biofuel bets include: a $60 million investment into Tropical BioEnergia, a Brazilian company that plans to build two ethanol refineries in Brazil, and a $90 million investment into cellulosic ethanol-maker Verenium to both access the startup’s technology and create a joint venture to work on cellulosic ethanol production.
We were wondering what the day-to-day work was like for Altschuler — Does he feel like “The Man” constantly imposing bureaucracy on the flowering scientific dreams of the scientists? Not so much; he says that “most scientists have been exposed to this and understand what it entails.” Mostly he makes it his goal to remove barriers so that the professors can publish papers as quickly and easily as possible.
And actually, given this is the Bay Area, the scientists could turn out to be quite entrepreneurial. Altschuler says “its still too early to tell” if there’s a wealth of professors-turned-entrepreneurs at EBI. But one of the first steps to transforming the innovations into businesses is getting that IP patented, so investors will be able to fund the lab technology with far less risk.
When we asked Altschuler if he had any running favorites when it came to research projects, he said he liked the idea of “bio-prospecting,” which is basically looking into different environments to find microbes and enzymes to mimic or cultivate and genetically modify. For example, there are EBI research teams looking at the stomaches of termites and cows to find bacteria that can help us produce better biofuels. We’ll see which of EBI’s many innovations end up being hits over the next several years, and if Altschuler does his job, hold enough intellectual property to deliver financial home runs.
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