Fiscal Year 2024:
In Review

Putting faculty first

The Emory OTT team consists of 24 dedicated staff working together to make the technology transfer process happen as efficiently and effectively as possible. But it doesn’t start or end with our office. The tech transfer process begins long before a technology is disclosed to our office and lasts long after it’s licensed.

In FY2024, Emory University received over $1 billion in sponsored research awards for the second year in a row, surpassing our FY23 total with $1.1 billion in sponsored research in FY24. And according to the Journal of Technology Transfer, Emory is the third top contributor of FDA-approved drugs and vaccines in the world among public institutions – only behind the NIH and the entire University of California system.

Technology transfer is a team sport, so these incredible milestones don’t just happen on their own. They begin with our world-class faculty who spend countless hours in the lab researching, discovering, and mentoring the next generation of scientists. Supported by research funding, faculty conduct their innovative work. More than 6,000 publications came from Emory faculty over FY2024, with topics including AI training, better care for underserved communities, cancer research, and so much more. This year, Emory’s faculty hit outstanding milestones – three were named National Academy of Inventors Fellows and one invented a life-changing drug for chronic airway diseases, to name a couple. But it’s their daily (and often nightly) work, supported by generous funding, that truly drives discovery.

Those discoveries led to a buzz of activity in the OTT office. In FY2024, we received 231 new invention disclosures, executed 35 license agreements, and applied for 186 new U.S. patents – and had 48 issued. And when we successfully license Emory inventors’ technologies, that revenue is funneled back into research, further supporting their work. I am excited by these numbers and others, and I’m motivated to reach even higher in FY25.

This year’s success continues with other initiatives. With the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research, we graduated the first cohort of the Female Founders Forum and we continued to support female academic entrepreneurs with the Women in Innovation speaker series. Also in partnership with the SVPR and the Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship, OTT launched the new Emory Entrepreneurship Clinic, a workshop series for Emory faculty, post-docs, and grad students to launch and scale their start-ups.

However, FY24 was not without its challenges. One of the biggest our office and industry faces is the potential expansion of the Bayh-Dole Act’s march-in rights to include pricing considerations for inventions created with federal funding. I’ve written about this issue before but let me be clear: If the government uses march-in rights to control prices, not only will academic innovation suffer, but the public will also ultimately lose. I spent much of the past fiscal year campaigning against the expansion. While we don’t know the outcomes of the potential legal interpretation, this is something about which Emory and other universities remained concerned. After all, a large majority of our faculty rely on federal funding to create their life-saving and -changing innovations.

Emory’s faculty is why Emory OTT exists. We serve as a bridge through which to connect our researchers’ groundbreaking innovations with companies who can bring them to the world. But I must heartily thank the OTT team for a very successful year. Tech transfer is a team sport, and our office is home to the best players in the game. Thank you for your dedication, passion, and commitment to Emory’s success.

- Todd Sherer, Associate VP for Research, OTT Executive Director