The commercialization and technology transfer arm of the storied Baltimore university is helping to foster the region’s burgeoning tech scene.
Attracting early-stage investment is never simple, but aspiring founders in Silicon Valley and New York and Singapore take for granted that even if individual deals can be hard to secure, there sure is a lot of money flowing. For those living beyond the easy reach of a high-tech hotbed and prefer it that way, opportunities can be much harder to come by.
Which makes the success of Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, the commercialization and technology transfer arm of the Baltimore university—the first-ever research university in the United States—all the more remarkable. To date, JHTV—founded 10 years ago with a mission to help innovators from across its academic community translate their intellectual property into real-world applications—has helped launch more than 150 startups. The companies in its portfolio have raised more than $4 billion in venture funding.
It’s little surprise that while JHTV’s mandate extends across the entire Johns Hopkins community, the office focused much of its earliest efforts in collaboration with scientists at the School of Medicine, 17 of whom (past and present) have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—nor that the resulting projects yielded some notable wins. In recent years, big industry players acquired JHTV-backed biotech companies Thrive Earlier Detection, Haystack Oncology, and Personal Genome Diagnostics—and those are just the cancer-testing startups.
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