Dr. Nicholas Schiff, the Jerold B. Katz Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience in the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute, was among the early participants in entrepreneurship activity at Weill Cornell Medicine — even before the institution had the complete ecosystem that is Enterprise Innovation today.
In an interview with Enterprise Innovation, Dr. Schiff recounts how he was exposed to the ideas of non-disclosure and patenting, why he thinks knowledge of entrepreneurship is crucial to faculty and trainees, and the positive direction Weill Cornell Medicine is heading with all the on-campus resources to bring translational research to the patient bedside.
Dr. Schiff and his collaborators are launching a deep brain stimulation company for the treatment of traumatic brain injuries. His technology, Re-EmergeDBS, is a candidate therapy that involves direct electrical stimulation of the central thalamus of the human brain to improve chronically impaired cognitive functions in patients with moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury and has the potential to benefit millions of patients worldwide.
You are not new to the world of patenting and entrepreneurship. All those years ago, what was the initial driving force or impetus behind you starting to think about your work outside of a purely research setting and considering how it could be protected and expanded in a commercial situation?
My conceptual introduction to intellectual property originated in a chance conversation with a friend. I was planning experiments for a career award and was looking into whether I might get an industry grant to support part of my work. I mentioned this to a friend who introduced me to an inventor of deep brain stimulation technologies, and in my conversation with this inventor, they said, “most important, do not discuss your novel ideas until you establish a non-disclosure agreement.” This made sense at the time to me primarily in the context that the company representatives might share my ideas with other laboratories they worked with that could very easily begin competing experiments. I asked Weill Cornell Medicine to set up an agreement with the company I was planning to contact. This process became very long and drawn out and at the time, circa 1995, there was no consistent point of contact here at the institution to review inventions. Apparently, the Ithaca technology office director Walter Haeussler, whom I met much later in the process, asked the Office of Legal Counsel to speak with me and get an invention disclosure. I remember that discussion vividly because when the attorney asked me if I have invented anything, I said “no, but I am sure if these experiments are successful, they will lead to important inventions”. He replied, “Well, that is inventing. You need to write these ideas down and give me a synopsis.” And I was very confused. I had simply no idea that was the case. About six months later, I received a patent search that was remarkably short and said basically that the idea was patentable. I showed it to my chairman, Dr. Fred Plum, who looked at it and told me, “I have seen a lot of these. This is best I have ever encountered; you should pursue it.” Checking Google Scholar, I found that the patent now has 538 citations. It launched a 25-year-plus aspect of my work helping me find resources and ways to develop the science.
Innovation and entrepreneurship at Weill Cornell Medicine has changed over time with more resources and support being made available for faculty and students. How have you seen things improve over the years?
It is amazing to see how things have changed over this time and in all positive directions. The development first of on-site support for inventors was crucial with the advent of what is now called Center for Technology Licensing (CTL). The expansion into developing “gap” funding mechanisms, specifically the Daedalus Fund for Innovation, is probably the most important advancement I have seen; and this general area remains key for further leveraging and developing aid for Weill Cornell Medicine inventors. When we formed our first startup, we had to cede most of the equity because of a mismatch of such resources. Further creation of greater resources to test and develop the translational steps needed to move from bench to bedside will improve the ability of inventors to bring ideas into the community. The new training programs aimed at students, the BioVenture eLab, many on-campus conferences, the tighter partnerships with Ithaca and Cornell Tech all represent really spectacular growth. There is clearly now a local entrepreneurial ecosystem in place at Weill Cornell.
What do you see are the benefits of entrepreneurship? How have you been nurturing this skillset in your trainees?
When a patentable idea arises in the course of research, I always teach my trainees at that point about intellectual property, and usually at the outset of that discussion, I will say something like, “patenting takes a lot of sustained work overtime. The bar should be set high to undertake this effort and only when you really want to develop the ideas and bring them forward sufficiently that either you or someone else can move them to translation.” In translational work—at the interface of bench to bedside—it is basically essential to put some effort into developing these skills and protecting ideas so that others can take on the risks to give the critical financial support needed to develop them. Once the landscape of what can be done to create different kinds of translations is understood, most of the time there is a point where having excellent intellectual property allows you to move forward as an investigator in a way that simply is not otherwise possible. In my work, I have seen activities shift back and forth across varying proportional mixes of federal, private foundation, philanthropic and direct industry funding. The industry funding for developing your own ideas invariably requires understanding and working with patents and technology licensing and in some cases developing startups. One can always benefit from learning about this process but for the translational researcher, it is really a core skill.
Do you see an important added value to working with Enterprise Innovation that should be considered as an integral part of working at Weill Cornell and contributing to its entrepreneurship ecosystem?
100 percent. I cannot envision how one could approach and successfully engage this process without working with Enterprise Innovation as a Weill Cornell investigator. This is complex terrain and there is a lot to do and keep track of over time. Having these on-campus resources is, in my view, the only way to make it possible to add this to the role of the investigative scientist. I think that is a microcosm effect akin to the larger ecosystem structure. Once the process can be understood and seen as an option when appropriate to reach certain goals, the logic of developing intellectual property and using it to draw resources into translational projects becomes part of the overall thought process as an investigator. It simply adds important dimension and flexibility to your ability to successfully move work forward.