John Mugler and James Brookeman walked to the podium and posed for pictures. Erik Hewlett, chair of the UVA Patent Foundation Board of Directors, handed each a shiny plaque. On April 13, at the newly opened Pavilion at Boar’s Head Inn, Mugler and Brookeman received the 2009 Edlich-Henderson Inventor of the Year, a $10,000 award, the highest honor bestowed by the University’s Patent Foundation to inventors whose patented technology has been proven to have positively impacted society.
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James Brookeman (left) and John Mugler were awarded the Edlich-Henderson Inventor of the Year award by the UVA Patent Foundation. “It’s in a sense a validation that both what you worked on and the time you spent were well-spent, and also a validation that you’ve done something that’s actually useful,” says Mugler of the award. |
Professors of radiology and biomedical engineering, Mugler and Brookeman were honored for their research in magnetic resonance imaging techniques that made taking an MRI much quicker, a great benefit for the patient. The researchers developed a 3D pulse sequencing technique, a faster method to get an MRI, called MP-RAGE (Magnetization-Prepared Rapid Gradient Echo) that is able to produce detailed, three-dimensional images in a very short amount of time. In older MRI techniques, the patient had to remain still for about 10 minutes, but now, the procedure can be over in half the time.
In 1993, the Patent Foundation awarded the patent, and, since then, it has been licensed to big companies like Siemens and Phillips and is currently used in MRI scanners around the world.
“We didn’t invent 3D imaging,” says Mugler. “We are trying to do things like making it faster, or get higher resolution so you can see finer structures, or make the image quality better, which translates to being able to see a certain structure or a certain disease better.”
The other current thrust of their research is the use of hyperpolarized gases in imaging to create contrast agents while taking an MRI. “It turns out that the lung is very poorly shown on an X-ray,” says Brookeman, and so are asthma and emphysema. “You breathe in the gas and you can turn on the frequency so it only sees the gas. So, it’s the first time that you can see something inside the lung.”
Brookeman says this type of research has opened up new areas of study, “like looking at the effect of smoking on your lungs,” he says. But although some technology was already available before Brookeman and Mugler began their own research, Brookeman stressed the importance of having the new generations of medical students and doctors who grew up playing Nintendo.
“Imaging in a sense has really only grown to be a mature thing with the ability to have computers cut the images,” says Brookeman. “You probably can see the difference between an old Kodak camera with the film, and what you can do now with a digital one. Essentially, that’s occurred with MRI and imaging in general.”
In this past fiscal year, 178 invention disclosure and 179 provisional patent applications were filed by UVA faculty; 65 total deals were made with companies and institutions. Thirteen copyrights were registered to University authors. Around 54 percent of all 2008 invention disclosures came out of the School of Medicine, followed by the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, with approximately 28 percent, and the School of Arts and Sciences, with 17 percent.
“One of the things that has become very important for UVA is to move beyond just the basic research in the science labs to recognizing that part of the mission of a university to make sure that the benefits of that science reaches the public,” says Marie Kerbeshian, interim executive director and CEO of the Patent Foundation. The biggest challenge in the current economic downturn, says Kerbeshian, is the fact that inventions coming out of UVA are at a very early stage. “Companies want to see technologies developed further in a university setting, and that requires two things: one is funding,” she says, while the other is a culture change to promptly promote translational research.
But the Patent Foundation has yet to find a permanent replacement for former director Robert MacWright, who resigned in January. “UVA, through the new Vice President for Research Tom Skalak, is taking, really for the first time, a systematic evaluation at what UVA wants to do in the realm of technology commercialization,” says Kerbeshian.
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