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Stanford program gives discoveries a shot at commercialization

Nature Medicine volume 17, pages 1326–1327 (2011)Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 06 January 2012

This article has been updated

In the late 1990s, Daria Mochly-Rosen, a protein chemist at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, discovered that a certain class of drugs that inhibit enzymes known as protein kinase C could reduce cardiac damage after a heart attack. Working with Stanford's Office of Technology Licensing (OTL), she patented the finding with hopes of licensing it to a pharmaceutical company. No one showed any interest.

Determined, Mochly-Rosen made the rounds with her colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry. But her pharma contacts wanted a drug to prevent heart attacks, not something to give after them. “They told me to go away,” she says. So, in 2002, Mochly-Rosen and her then–graduate student Leon Chen founded KAI Pharmaceuticals to commercialize this technology. To see the process through, Mochly-Rosen took a year off from academia to raise money for her company, work through the regulatory process with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and launch a clinical trial.

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Change history

  • 06 January 2012

     In the November 2011 issue, the article entitled "Stanford program gives discoveries a shot at commercialization" stated that the SPARK program had 80 projects, 50% of which were licensed. In fact, the program has handled 40 projects, roughly half of which have been licensed. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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  1. Mike May
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May, M. Stanford program gives discoveries a shot at commercialization. Nat Med 17, 1326–1327 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm1111-1326b

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