From discovery to commercial success:
What Does It Take to Turn Research into Business? At Danish universities, research-born discoveries are increasingly being transformed into spin-out companies but, according to a tech-transfer expert at Aarhus University, it didn’t happen overnight. Written by Sebastian Kjær
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n 2019, Draupnir Bio received an investment of 225 million DKK. AgroIntelli followed suit with 108 million DKK in 2020. And only this year, Muna Therapeutics managed to raise an impressive 450 million DKK. Although their product differs—from drugs to prevent blood clots in the heart, self-propelled agricultural machinery and the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases—what these three companies have in common is that they have all spun out of research conducted at Aarhus University. The university therefore owns the patents on which these companies are based. Meanwhile, Draupnir Bio, AgroIntelli and Muna Therapeutics serve as excellent examples for how university research can evolve into viable commercial projects. “The number of patents aren’t nearly as important to us as the amount of jobs created by the companies based on the research. That’s where we can see that we’re really making a difference, when our spin-out companies are able to employ hundreds of people,” says Morten Holmager, Business Development Manager at Aarhus University’s Tech Transfer Office. Over the past decade, the Tech Transfer Office has helped to establish 31 spin-out companies based on intellectual property rights from Aarhus University. As of today, 21 of those companies are still active and employ approximately 200 people.
In it for the long haul This is not just the case for Aarhus University; the number of spin-out companies from all Danish universities has been growing over the past 10 years, reaching a peak in 2019 and 2020, where Danish universities “spun out” a total of 27 patent-based companies. What seems to have catalysed such growth is that universities are getting better at commercialising their patents. This is no small achievement, according to Holmager, because the process from patent registration to commercialisation is such a long one. “It involves us, together with the researchers, building up a case for how their patent can become a spin-out company. We figure out the business model and we also devise a strategy for a possible sale of the company further down the line. For a typical life science company, there’s usually a pre-clinical phase and then a sale to a pharmaceutical company,” he says. Aarhus University’s latest spin-out, iNotify, is one example of just how long the process from research to business can be. The main researcher has been researching reproduction for over 20 years and only four years ago discovered some molecules that have the potential to help women who don’t respond well to hormone therapy get pregnant. However, before the project could go any further, there was a need to ascer-
Morten Holmager Business Development Manager at Aarhus University’s Tech Transfer Office
From University To Unicorn
