The Chronicle of Higher Education ranked Hopkins 27th in patent licensing income earned during fiscal year 2007 among all private and state universities.
According to The Chronicle, Hopkins earned $10,260,830.
The Johns Hopkins Office of Technology Transfer (JHTT) supports inventors from different divisions of the University by assisting in patenting new inventions and in marketing them to entrepreneurs and peer schools.
Dr. Wesley D. Blakeslee, executive director of the JHTT, attributed Hopkins's low rank to the fact that, unlike higher-ranked schools, the University lacks three or four revenue-generating "blockbuster inventions."
Stanford University, ranked 10th by The Chronicle, earned $50,370,600. Katharine Ku, director of Technology Licensing at Stanford, credited a "blockbuster invention" for much of the University's earnings.
"We have one biotech method patent that brought in about one-half the income," Ku wrote in an e-mail to the News-Letter.
According to Blakeslee, although Hopkins ranks lower in overall licensing income, the University's conversion ratio, the amount of licenses sold in a given year, is in the 30 percent range, a percentage similar to higher-ranked schools.
According to Ku, "about 25 to 30 percent" of Stanford's inventions are licensed out.
Blakeslee explained that long-term revenue generation in Technology Transfer is often highly dependent on an invention's success in the marketplace.
"In our business, which is primarily early stage basic science or biomedical or pharmaceutical products, those take 10 or more years to get a product to market, and royalties are entirely dependent on market size," he wrote.
According to Blakeslee, earnings for fiscal year 2007 were between $9 million and $10 million, slightly less than The Chronicle reported.
Blakeslee explained that the discrepancy was likely due to The Chronicle's inclusion of earnings from additional University divisions.
Many of the Hopkins's inventions are medical-related. According to Blakeslee, approximately 90 percent of the school's inventions come from the medical school.
"We have a tremendous number of cancer inventions," Blakeslee wrote. "We have technology for the precise planting of electrodes in the brain that would allow for surgery on tumors that were previously inoperable." Blakeslee also mentioned that the University holds patents in nanotechnology and surgical robotics.
"The primary focus is not on license revenue but on getting inventions into the marketplace. Sometimes we put them in the public domain if we think doing so will better advance the University's mission," Blakeslee wrote.
Wake Forest University ranked fifth on the list, earning $71,226,905 in licensing revenue during fiscal year 2007.
"We have several inventions that bring in significant royalty income every year," Director of Technology Asset Management for Wake Forest University Health Sciences Dr. Michael Batalia wrote in an e-mail to the News-Letter.
"They include the V.A.C. [a negative pressure wound care therapy] medical device sold by KCI, Capstone spine surgical tools sold by Medtronic and Virtual Endoscopy technologies sold by GE Medical," Batalia wrote.
According to Blakeslee, Hopkins's revenue has been steadily increasing.
"We doubled our income (gross and net) over the last five years, and expect to do the same the next five years, despite the current economic environment. That's a 14 percent compounded annual rate of growth," he wrote.
"We are going in the right direction."
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