Harvard money, minds seed promising start-ups

What’s more, the team is about to begin raising a much bigger fund of $20 million to $30 million. And unlike in the past, when Harvard had laggard’s reputation for commercializing research, universities around the country are starting to look at the school as a possible role model.

The Accelerator Fund was created to help Harvard scientists commercialize their inventions by forming industry partnerships, licensing technology, and starting companies, primarily in the life sciences and biomedical fields.

As Harvard’s technology development head and senior associate provost, Isaac Kohlberg, puts it, “The pipelines of Harvard were empty.’’ The school “suffered from a branding issue with stakeholders about the role of technology development.’’

Kohlberg and his team, which includes Curtis Keith, chief scientific officer of the Accelerator Fund, were brought in to overhaul Harvard’s technology transfer and development offices. Kohlberg joined the university in 2005 and had previously worked at Tel Aviv University and New York University. Keith, who joined in early 2008, cofounded Cambridge-based CombinatoRx (now called Zalicus Inc.)

Looking back on the first four years of the Accelerator program, Kohlberg singles out five important growth factors:

■Its focus on life sciences, which makes up about 60 percent of Harvard research.

■The governance structure for making investment decisions (a small group of people, mostly from industry).

■An internal project management system, including staff to manage grants, projects, and R&D roadmaps.

■The flexibility to perform certain parts of the chosen projects in external contract research organizations, not just in Harvard labs.

■Being integrated with Harvard’s business development program, which includes intellectual property and licensing transactions.

So what kinds of projects have received funding, and what has come of them?