
University of Pittsburgh and UPMC Enter Partnership with Johnson & Johnson Corporate Office of Science and Technology to Jointly Fund Research
PITTSBURGH, March 1, 2012 – The University of Pittsburgh and UPMC have entered into a partnership with Johnson & Johnson Corporate Office of Science and Technology (COSAT) to support translational research, which transforms lab findings into usable products and services, by jointly allocating research monies to university faculty from a mutually established fund.
COSAT has a long history of supporting the development of technologies through collaboration with academic institutions, and Pitt holds a strong record of moving basic scientific research from the lab to the patient’s bedside. The new agreement is designed to improve the speed of development of early stage Pitt technologies that hold the greatest potential to benefit patients and improve services delivered by the health care system.
Pitt will lead a committee including representatives from COSAT and UPMC to identify projects of promise that could benefit from funding support. As with other research efforts, intellectual property or technologies developed at Pitt through this program will be owned by the university and made available through licensing agreements to industry collaborators through well-established procedures.
Arthur S. Levine, M.D., Pitt’s senior vice chancellor for the health sciences and dean, School of Medicine, noted that “the university has tremendous capabilities in all aspects of biomedical research. This new partnership with COSAT will foster the continued development of high-caliber work with great scientific and therapeutic potential.”
The University of Pittsburgh and UPMC recently formed a pharmaceutical collaboration committee to address how best to work with the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, including the co-mingled COSAT fund. The committee is led by D. Lansing Taylor, Ph.D., director of the University of Pittsburgh Drug Discovery Institute and Allegheny Foundation Professor of Computational and Systems Biology, and composed of faculty from the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, and the Schools of Medicine and Pharmacy, as well as staff from the university’s Office of Technology Management and UPMC.