Can we make auto parts out of vegetables?
It’s the classic research commercialization story. Mohini Sain, a U of T professor in Forestry and Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, wondered if renewable raw materials could be used instead of plastic in everything from car bumpers to sports equipment.
He began experimenting with natural materials such as soybean oils, potato starch, corn, hemp, wood and agro-fibre. The research went so well that Sain partnered with The Innovations Group (TIG) at U of T to create a spin-off company called Greencore Composites.
Today, Greencore is working with a manufacturing company to conduct intensive plant trials and create products. The first product from the company is Greencore Green Inside Natural Fibre Reinforced Composites. These cellulose-based pellets can replace petroleum-based materials and glass fibres in automotive parts, furniture and a variety of other industrial applications.
What was a spark in Mohini Sain’s imagination is now a product that is helping to provide sound environmental alternatives in a growing bio-based economy.
Mention Sain and Greencore to Tim McTiernan and his eyes light up.
“It’s the perfect example of what universities and hospitals can do by taking certain types of research to the marketplace. It’s about creating products and services that make life longer and better for people all over the world.”
In addition to his role as assistant vice- president, research at U of T, McTiernan is also executive director of TIG, the university’s in-house commercialization operation. He and the TIG team work with U of T researchers to manage invention disclosures and intellectual property, license technology, create spin-off companies and help researchers find funding for their ventures into the marketplace.
McTiernan notes that the practice of using research to create products and technologies that can be used by society has been taking place for decades but only over the past 20 years has it assumed a central and high profile in the missions of universities.
In U of T’s case, it all got started with what might be the model for successful commercialization — the manufacturing of insulin as a product for treating diabetes.
After the team of Frederick Banting, Charles Best, J.J.R. Macleod and James Collip discovered insulin in 1921-22 (which won Banting and Macleod a Nobel Prize), the Connaught Laboratories were created to turn the hormone into a therapy for diabetics. In 1972, U of T sold the labs for $29 million and created the Connaught Fund. U of T continues to reap the benefits of the transaction. The fund awards more than $3 million a year to U of T scholars.
Similar big scores were made at other universities (Gatorade at the University of Florida in the mid-1960s, for example) but McTiernan points out that research commercialization at universities didn’t really begin to blossom until 1980, with the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in the United States, which, according to the website of the Association of University Technology Managers, “provided an incentive for universities to protect their innovations and, therefore, for industry to make high-risk investments resulting in products made from those innovations.”
Since then, research commercialization has, says U of T Vice-President, Research Paul Young, “moved past the buzzword stage and become an essential complement to the research enterprise.”
Governments are becoming part of the action too. “In fact, many government grants now have a commercialization component, such as the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation’s Ontario Research Fund-Research Excellence program (ORF-RE),” says Cyril Gibbons, director of TIG’s physical sciences and engineering team. “Governments are making huge investments in research and they want to see, where possible, a return on that investment, with jobs and economic prosperity for society created. And they are really starting to create funding to help us do that.”
Gibbons is referring to programs such as MRI’s Ontario Research Commercialization Program (ORCP) and the Government of Canada’s new Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR) program (see Page 6).
“In the past 10 years, research commercialization has made a huge leap in really becoming useful to university faculty members,” says McTiernan. “With the new organizations and funding we have in place and that will be starting up, we will be able to make a resounding impact in terms of our contribution to Canadian prosperity.”