RESEARCH COMMERCIAL AGREEMENTS

Michael Rondelli Associate Vice President for Research Commercial Agreements

In FY22, Research Commercial Agreements (RCA) continued to focus on customer service and build on FY21 progress in streamlining the contracting and tech transfer processes. RCA’s continued success was the product of its team approach to our work. The team created 789 contracts, including 12 technology license agreements.

Technology Transfer: Technology transfer is the process of commercializing intellectual property developed by UNT faculty and staff. While the tech transfer metrics were done from the record-breaking year of FY21, all metrics remained above average. The university filed 43 new patent applications and issued 11 new patents – a record high over the past five years. The total of 12 license agreements is the third highest in UNT history (FY21 and FY20 are first and second) and included UNT surpassing the one-million-dollar mark in cumulative licensing revenue for the university. In addition, a UNT licensed technology (InspectIR COVID-19 Breathalyzer) received an Emergency Use Authorization from the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), the first such authorized device for UNT. UNT also received its first licensing royalty based on sales from a licensed emergency management software platform.

Research Contracting: FY22 brought on the introduction of the GRAMS platform for sponsored award management. RCA transitioned the processing and storage of all funded contracts to GRAMS when it went live in March. Since the agreements module tracks the status of the contract processing, this all-in-one suite allows faculty to check on the status of their agreements on their dashboard. Even while going through this transition, the contracting team increased the number of contracts created to 789 and continued to efficiently process contracts with short turnaround times. This is a testament to how quickly the team adjusted to processing contracts through the new system and learned how to take advantage of the new functionality.