Frederica Freyberg:
UW-Madison researchers plan to get on the economic development train in a brand new way. UW’s “Discovery to Product” puts promising new research on the fast track to commercial development. It’s a future where scholars are also budding entrepreneurs. And the campus-wide program is headed up by up by UW animal science professor, Mark Cook. Professor, thanks very much for being here.
Mark Cook:
Thank you for having me.
Frederica Freyberg:
Tell me what the point of this “Discovery to Product” effort is.
Mark Cook:
Well, we haven’t really had a technology transfer machine on campus. We have a lot of innovations. We spend a billion dollars a year creating new knowledge. And out of that billion dollars we probably get a lot of innovations that pop up. But normally those grants don’t really fund innovation. So if you’re– you’ve got an idea, you might be able to patent it. If you can patent it, you can go to WARF, and WARF can help in tech transfer. But I think most of the innovations are not patentable. And so we have no vehicle for moving technology off this campus, until now.
Frederica Freyberg:
How does this change that?
Mark Cook:
Well, so D2P is really going to bring in experts that understand what the market needs, people that have been successful in starting companies, serial entrepreneurs that can actually help people with innovations bring in different types of resources to try to help move these ideas forward. Somebody with an idea normally doesn’t have a good feel for exactly what are the steps that need to be taken to turn it into successful product. But if you bring an entrepreneur in, they can do it. So that’s phase one. Phase two is to resource this, bring cash in to help do it as well.
Frederica Freyberg:
So, because I was reading with interest that some researchers, young researchers in particular, will spend, you know, their 60 hours a week doing their research, and then on the side try to kind of put this together to take it to some kind of commercial market. Is that what has been happening until this effort came along?
Mark Cook:
The only way we’ve had tech transfer on this campus is if you happen to be an entrepreneur and you’re willing to burn lots of extra hours on weekends. So we hope to actually be able to facilitate that a lot better, for students, faculty, our staff. It doesn’t matter. We’re looking for innovations and help to transfer those out. And we’ll have the resources, maybe, to buy out time so people can actually invest time on those innovations.
Frederica Freyberg:
So what’s been the reaction to researchers on campus to this?
Mark Cook:
I think there’s lots of excitement. In fact, I’m not full-time. I don’t get paid to do this and I can barely keep up, and we haven’t even announced it or made a call for the innovations yet. But they’re coming in.
Frederica Freyberg:
What are some examples of your own innovations that have successfully gone to commercial market?
Mark Cook:
So I’ve started three companies. But before I started any company, I was pretty heavily involved in doing a lot of patenting, patents which got licensed out to other companies. So I have one group of products that Mike — and I developed which are called conjugated linoleic acid, CLA, for simplicity. So those are sold worldwide as dietary supplements. They’re also added to food. Several of us started a little company to move this into animal agriculture. It was called — and that got bought by a German company called BASF. Then I had another company that was moving novel antibodies that are used orally in animal agriculture, in fish and calves and swine. Now I have a company called Isomark which does breath measurements for detecting infection in intensive care patients and babies, and things like that.
Frederica Freyberg:
And there are so many of these kinds of ideas and innovations on this campus that can now be tapped. Do you know of any that are kind of in the pipeline that might be the first to go?
Mark Cook:
I think there are hundreds of them. And not just from faculty, I’m talking to students. It is amazing. There’s stuff all over this place. And I think as we build this culture, I think we’re going to be quite amazed at what types of things come out of a research engine that invests a billion dollars a year.
Frederica Freyberg:
Is this the kind of thing other major research universities are already doing?
Mark Cook:
Yes, we’re behind. We’re probably way behind. So a lot of other ones that are much smaller than us, places like Utah, that put these machines together and have been working this. Michigan’s probably into this five or six years. MIT, I talked to MIT I think it was Wednesday, and I think we’re ten years behind MIT. So it’s time to do it here.
Frederica Freyberg:
We’re going to catch up though, and we're going to catch up fast.
Mark Cook:
Overnight.
Frederica Freyberg:
That’s right. What might this mean for the state of Wisconsin as a whole?
Mark Cook:
It’s going to mean jobs. It’s going to mean– well, several things. It’s going to be jobs because we’re going to be keeping the innovations here. We’re not just going to be licensing technologies out that go all over the world. We’ll be able to start them here. That means people can invest in them. People, hopefully, will make money from them. We create jobs. And who knows? Increase exports, and things like that. So I’m pretty excited about it.
Frederica Freyberg:
All right. Mark Cook, thanks very much for joining us.
Mark Cook:
Okay.
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News Stories from PBS Wisconsin
02/03/25
‘Here & Now’ Highlights: State Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez, Jane Graham Jennings, Chairman Tehassi Hill

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