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University Venture Development Fund 2021-22 Donor Impact Report

Nurturing Innovation

“Your gift to the UVDF supports this endless, upward cycle. It also helps bring new enterprises—and jobs—to Oregon.”

—Anshuman Razdan, Vice President for Research and Innovation

Universities provide two key products: knowledge and learning opportunities for students. Expanding knowledge for its own sake is fundamental. Often, this knowledge can also be applied to make new discoveries—for example, medical devices, products, or software.

If you excel at innovation, you end up with something tangible that benefits society or the economy. If you’re lucky, it benefits both.

The University Venture Development Fund (UVDF) helps the UO’s top innovators move their discoveries from campus to commercial applications. These early stages of entrepreneurship are crucial—so tenuous that even our most brilliant, dedicated scholars require additional resources to bridge the gap from the lab to the marketplace.

Just as a sapling needs nourishment to grow into a tree, these early startups benefit greatly from even the smallest amount of help. The UO’s passionate, talented faculty members do the heavy lifting. The UVDF simply helps create the conditions that enable them to thrive, providing our budding entrepreneurs with advice, networks, and financial resources.

If this early growth goes well, the proverbial seedling establishes strong, deep roots—and the UVDF moves on to nurture other new ideas. But that’s not the end.

Innovation is more like a circular feedback loop than a one-way journey. Success feeds success, and new companies eventually give back to the UO. They provide opportunities for our students, hire alumni, and open doors for other new companies.

Your gift to the UVDF supports this ongoing, upward cycle. It also helps bring new enterprises—and jobs—to Oregon.

—Anshuman Razdan, Vice President for Research and Innovation

UVDF Success in 2021-22

100 Students Supported

11 Startups Launched

2 Entrepreneurial Programs Launched

12 Products and Services on the Market

20 Proof of Concept Projects Supported

20 Translational Research Grants

Women's Innovation Network participants from the pilot cohort in 2021-22

Network of—and by and for—Women Entrepreneurs

UVDF supports the Women’s Innovation Network (WIN), a collaborative initiative that unites entrepreneurs, community members, and UO faculty and staff members to overcome gender-based barriers

“The data is clear about gender disparities in patents, inventions, and copyrights. We’re grateful the UVDF is supporting this new way of addressing those barriers.”

—Mandy Gettler, WIN coleader

Winning Year for Women's Innovation Network

• 7 invention disclosures received from WIN participants. Invention disclosures are the first step in identifying new inventions for intellectual property protection.

• 2 patent applications with WIN participants listed as inventors.

• 1 federal grant application submitted by WIN participants.

• 2 participants promoted during their time in the program.

• 1 participant developed a DEI initiative at her company to support women and BIPOC employees working in STEM fields.

• 1 mentor closed a $6M round for her Albany-based startup, providing living wage jobs for those in the state and boosting the visibility of the biotech sector in Oregon.

• 88% of WIN mentors in 2021-22 and 50% of WIN mentors in 2022-22 have not been in a formal mentoring role before. WIN provided training and support, thereby increasing the diversity and quality of knowledgeable mentors for others working in the innovation and entrepreneurship space.

As a former administrator with the UO’s Innovation Partnership Services, Mandy Gettler understands the challenges women entrepreneurs face. These obstacles often involve complex issues. But they can also be as simple as what to wear or how to make sure you’re heard.

“I’ve been fortunate to have amazing male mentors,” says Gettler, who is the coleader of WIN. “But they could not prepare me for all the challenges women face. What do you wear for a business presentation? Sometimes, your dress doesn’t have a place to clip on a lavalier microphone.

“We want to connect women with other women, so they can have conversations about entrepreneurship, help each other, and gain confidence. For example, when you’re the only woman in a room, sometimes having a voice requires extra effort.”

That barrier can be overcome with some preparation, Gettler adds. She points to research on gender and communication that demonstrates how women’s voices are often ignored—and how certain words and strategies can help. By practicing proven verbal tactics and having a toolkit of useful phrases at the ready, women entrepreneurs can communicate clearly and effectively.

This is just one example of how WIN, a UO network of faculty members, students, and women executives and business leaders helps women entrepreneurs. Last year, the inaugural cohort of 20 UO faculty members, graduate students, and Lane County entrepreneurs completed the nine-month program. The second group of 23 women started this October, and this year the UVDF is helping fund the program.

Each participant is assigned a mentor. UO faculty members and students benefit greatly from perspectives beyond academia, Gettler says. All the participants learn about different career paths from seasoned professionals. Or, if the path doesn’t exist yet, they can learn the tools to start their own businesses and blaze a trail.

Monthly WIN workshops include topics such as bringing research to market, risk tolerance, reframing failure, patents, forming a company, and how to make the most of community resources.

Head Start for Startups

New director of the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship brings bold ideas for expanding scope, impact of innovation center

Jeff Sorensen has only been at the UO for a month or so. But he’s been a champion for entrepreneurship since he was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan.

“During my senior year, I was frustrated by what I saw as a lack of practical, experiential learning opportunities,” Sorensen says. “I thought ‘Let's create a space for students to work on projects that make a real impact in the world—and give us experiences beyond just writing papers and taking tests.’”

That was the genesis of optiMize, a social innovation community and cohort-based incubator designed to help students start projects that make a positive impact. It was so successful, the university hired him to keep it going. Within ten years, the program became a national model.

As the new director of the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship, Sorensen has bold aspirations.

“I get excited by opportunities to build new things with a lot of potential,” Sorensen says. “Oregon has a ton of potential, as well as entrepreneurial energy from our students.”

Sorensen plans to expand the center’s reach to more areas of campus and offer new opportunities for students beyond business ventures. Those could include creating student groups, starting nonprofit organizations, or whatever new ideas students dream up.

The point, he says, is taking action—and risks. Regardless of the end result, the entrepreneurial process teaches students how to explore possibilities strategically, make decisions, and believe in themselves. The lessons they learn will benefit our graduates (and society) in surprising ways, perhaps decades later.

Sorensen would also like to expand the center’s reach in tech transfer, helping UO researchers translate new discoveries into products and services that benefit society. He envisions multidisciplinary student teams that help advance translational research.

“A big part of our role is to prepare the next generation to create change, and that starts while they’re here with us on campus,” Sorensen says. “Experiential learning is the best way to help them graduate as innovative, proactive, and resilient change makers.”

New Scientific Search Tool

UO spinout, world’s first synthetic biology company built on a high-throughput genetic modification platform for animals seeks to accelerate R&D

Stephen Banse and Zach Stevenson in the Phillips Lab on the UO campus

“Scientists dream of making discoveries”, says Dr. Stephen Banse, an Assistant Research Professor with the UO’s Institute of Ecology and Evolution. But he’s more focused on the tools used to make those discoveries.

“Technological advancements give outsized returns on investment,” Banse says. “For example, a new microscope can open up whole new worlds. Inevitably, many different researchers are going to use that tool to gain new insights and advance their respective fields, as well as industry and society.”

A cutting-edge tool developed at the UO—not a microscope, but a new technology for genetic research—promises to revolutionize the biotech industry. Much like moving from dialup to broadband internet, the technology enables genetic information to be experimentally moved in animals at an unprecedented scale. While the speed gains of broadband enabled novel applications like tele-surgery and remote work, this genetic technology may unleash new potential through experiments that have been, until now, impossible to conduct.

Evergreen Bioworks, a UO spinoff launching soon with help from the UVDF, has developed a way to exponentially increase the pace of research and development in the emerging field of therapeutic peptides, or “biologics”. Peptides are short chains of amino acids that can be synthesized by chemists or living organisms. Therapeutic peptides, an emerging pharmaceutical area, offer great promise.

Banse is cofounder of the company, along with UO Interim President Patrick Phillips and Zach Stevenson, a biology PhD candidate at the UO. Their synthetic biology platform is the first to use animals, starting with Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny roundworm.

“The biologics world is relatively fertile ground for cures,” Stevenson says. “We’re still exploring. Scientists in this area could make a wide range of potential discoveries, including cures for conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease or diabetes.”

Chemists synthesize compounds to develop drugs. But biologics drug developers use DNA and living cells to create new treatments. So far, this process has been effectively limited to single cell organisms, such as bacteria. Evergreen Bioworks is the first company built on an animal-based synthetic biology platform for biologic design and production.

Working with more complex organisms will accelerate genetic research that benefits human health, Stevenson says. As a preclinical pharmaceutical company, Evergreen Bioworks won’t bring drugs to market. Instead, it will develop model organisms, then collaborate with traditional pharmaceutical companies to develop, and obtain approval, for new peptide therapeutics.

They call the genetics technology underlying their research platform TARDIS—Transgenic Arrays Resulting in Diversity of Integrated Sequences—and the reference to Dr. Who is no coincidence. In the British science fiction series, this police box combines a time machine and transporter, a device that was fantastically much bigger on the inside than the outside.

When the Evergreen Bioworks TARDIS platform is put to work, a one-millimeter worm becomes a vast canvas for DNA experimentation. In essence, it’s bigger on the inside than the outside.

The end result? Biotech companies can create transgenic animals a thousand times faster than what is currently possible. Ultimately, that means more biologic therapies to improve human health.

UO Research and Curricular Initiatives

Take a tax break

For Oregonians, as much as 60 percent of your gift is eligible for a tax credit, with a maximum benefit of $600,000. Individuals or corporations may contribute cash or publicly traded stock, and credits are available on a first-come, first-served basis. There is a limit to the total Oregon income tax credits the UO can issue. Please contact us for more information.

Gifts to UVDF support:

  • Funding for entrepreneurial programs
  • Budding business owners and Oregon’s economy
  • Opportunities for students to gain experience applying research to commercial activities
  • Proof-of-concept resources to help faculty and students demonstrate the feasibility of new ideas
  • More opportunities to transform research into commercial ventures that create Oregon jobs

To learn more or discuss giving to UVDF, contact the Office of Gift Planning: 541-346-1687 or giftplan@uoregon.edu

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