When a U of T invention has commercial potential the Innovations and Partnerships Office (IPO) at U of T gets involved.
“The main objective of IPO is to facilitate the application of knowledge generated at U of T to a world beyond U of T,” said Professor Peter Lewis, IPO’s acting executive director and U of T’s associate vice president, research.
The IPO was previously known as The Innovation Group (TIG) and had as its core role the issue of commercialization. Responsible for receiving and accessing disclosures and developing technology into marketable and sell-able resources, the group altered its name to incorporate its role in making partnerships, specifically business development opportunities for researchers.
“Its function is to help recognize and realize the potential of innovations developed at U of T by building meaningful relationships with members from the private, public and government sectors,” said Lewis.
IPO is funded by the university and has about twenty-five full time staff. The budget is about $3M annually and the main office is located in the MaRS building.
While undergraduate students are not involved in the operations of IPO, many projects supported by the IPO hire undergraduate students as research assistants.
Projects that present commercial promise are handed off to the MaRS Innovation where they receive funding based on their anticipated return on investment.
The IPO has recently been involved with the work of Professor Aaron Wheeler, the Canada Research Chair of Bioanalytical Chemistry at the University of Toronto. Wheeler’s work focuses on using digital microfluidics to measure hormone levels in tissue as simply and accurately as possible, a technology potentially useful in early breast cancer detection.
IPO and the MaRS Innovation have provided funding to Wheeler Microfluids Labratory, a lab that includes ten graduate students and three postdoctoral fellows. Two recent PhD students are working with Wheeler to commercialize the technology.
“The chip is not yet ready to diagnose breast cancer, but helps show whether estrogen levels are elevated, which can signal a higher risk for the disease,” says Wheeler.
