Honors for Inventors

By ELLEN GOLDBAUM
News Services Editor

UB faculty and staff inventors who are named on 21 U.S. patents issued to the State University of New York Research Foundation in 1996 will receive awards, which recognize their achievements as inventors of patented devices, materials or drugs.

"This is a significant increase over last year in the number of patents received by the university," said Dan Massing, director of the Office of Technology Transfer. Last year, the university received 13 patents.

One reason for the jump in the number of patents awarded is that the university is filing a larger percentage of the invention disclosures that it receives from faculty and staff, Massing explained.

"We believe that the quality of the disclosures is improving," he said. "Also, faculty and staff are becoming more aware of the process for protecting intellectual property. They are beginning to consider invention disclosure ahead of publication in order to protect their rights to the invention."

He explained that when researchers publish their findings first, they may lose certain rights to file patent applications.

In addition, Massing pointed to changes in the rules of examination for software inventions by the U.S. Patent Office that are allowing more of them to be patented.

As is the case each year, some of the inventors are being honored this year for patents involving improvements and modifications on inventions for which they previously received patents.

Faculty and staff who believe they have an invention that may be patentable should contact the Office of Technology Transfer at 645-3811. Technology Transfer staff also are available to deliver to any academic department a 20-minute presentation that provides an introduction to the disclosure, patenting and licensing processes.

The UB faculty members and the work involved in the patents are:

· Linda B. Ludwig, research assistant professor of medicine, inventor of a method for preselecting a specific recombinant vector containing a nucleic acid sequence or gene of interest from a large number of other recombinant vectors.

· Ho-Leung Fung, professor and chair of pharmaceutics, and John A. Bauer, formerly research assistant professor of pharmaceutics, inventors of a method for the preparation of new, transdermal nitroglycerin patches, which will give sustained beneficial effects for more than 24 hours.

· Eli Ruckenstein, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Furnas Memorial Chair Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Liang Hong, adjunct research instructor and visiting scientist, inventors of a process utilizing emulsions to prepare composite, conductive polymers.

· Ernest Hausmann, professor of oral biology; Darold C. Wobschall, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering; Lance Ortman, associate professor and associate chair of restorative dentistry; Kristin M. Allen, research associate, and David S. Odrobina, doctoral candidate, inventors of a device that allows for exposure of a consistent and reproducible set of serial autoradiographs, ensuring accurate prognoses of tissue loss due to periodontal infection. Evren Kutlubay is co-inventor.

· Venu Govindaraju, associate director of the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) at UB, and Sargur Srihari, director of CEDAR and professor of computer science, inventors of a system for recognizing handwritten words of cursive script. Dacheng Wang is co-inventor.

· Yong-Chul Shin, research scientist at the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition; Ramalingam Sridhar, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering; Sargur Srihari, director of CEDAR and professor of computer science, and Victor Demjanenko, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, inventors of a technique that provides real-time image enhancement in processing systems where images have large variations in contrast.

· George C. Lee, director of the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research and professor of civil engineering; Zhong Liang, research assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Mai Tong, research instructor of civil engineering, inventors of an energy-dissipation system for manmade structures that is based on the biomechanics of the human body.

· Ramalingam Sridhar, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, inventor of a new type of field-effect transistor logic circuit for wave pipelining. Xugang Zhang is co-inventor.

· Yong-Chul Shin, research scientist at the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition, and Ramalingam Sridhar, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, inventors of a single layer neural network circuit, which performs linearly separable or non-linearly separable logical operations in a single layer.

· Richard T. Evans, associate professor of oral biology; Robert J. Genco, SUNY Distinguished Professor and chair in the Department of Oral Biology, and Hakimuddin T. Sojar, assistant professor of oral biology, inventors of components of a vaccine shown to inhibit attachment of bacterium to the surface of teeth. Gurrinder S. Bedi is co-inventor.

· Deborah D.L. Chung, Niagara Mohawk Professor of Materials Science and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, inventor of a new binder for making preforms for fabrication of metal matrix composites by liquid metal infiltration.

· Edward G. Niles, professor of biochemistry and microbiology, inventor of a transient expression that utilizes bacteriophage RNA polymerase in the presence of a DNA-based cytoplasmic virus to facilitate expression of a foreign gene in the cytoplasm of a eukaryotic cell. Bernard Moss, William Studier and Thomas Fuerst are co-inventors.

· Donald Hickey, research assistant professor of physiology and clinical assistant professor of neurosurgery, inventor of a non-invasive apparatus and method for obtaining a quantitative determination of mean left-atrial pressure.

· Timothy Murphy, professor of medicine and microbiology, inventor of a method for detecting branhamella catarrhalis and the use of proteins and peptides as antigens for vaccine formulations and as antigens in diagnostic immunoassays.

· Yi-Han Kao, professor of physics, and Deborah D.L. Chung, Niagara Mohawk Professor of Materials Science and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, inventors of a fullerene that is superconductive at much higher temperatures than has been previously shown. Kevin T. Fredette and Liwei Song are co-inventors.

· Scott Diamond, associate professor of chemical engineering, inventor of a rapid assay of activators and inhibitors of clotting. Jung-He Wu is co-inventor.

· Donald Hickey, research assistant professor of physiology and clinical assistant professor of neurosurgery, inventor of a method for positioning an esophageal catheter for determining pressures associated with the left atrium.

· Wayne K. Anderson, interim dean of the School of Pharmacy and professor of medicinal chemistry, inventor of new compounds and new compositions comprising these compounds that may be useful as fungicides, bactericides and inhibitors of cancer in warm-blooded animals. Dennis C. Dean is co-inventor.

· Wayne A. Anderson, professor of electrical and computer engineering, inventor of a method for forming a high capacitance thin film capacitor. Quanxi Jia, Junsin Yi and Lin-Huang Chang are co-inventors.

· Wayne A. Anderson, professor of electrical and computer engineering, inventor of a thin-film resistor comprising ruthenium oxide. Franklyn M. Collins, Quanxi Jia, Kaili Jiao and Hoong J. Lee are co-inventors.

· Marie-Louise Hammarskjold, former associate professor of biochemistry, David Rekosh, former professor of biochemistry, Molly Bray, former senior laboratory specialist, and Eric Hunter, inventors of a purified, retroviral constitutive transport enhancer to facilitate mRNA transport and produce recombinant, attenuated HIV.