Turning Basic Academic Research into a Profitable Business: LevTech Inc.

The discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in copper oxides

in 1986 generated grand scenarios for revolutionary advances in a

range of technologies, including transportation, medicine, computing,

electronics and energy. However, very few commercial applications of

high-TC cuprates presently exist, in spite of the substantial

increases of the transition temperature TC from 40 K to around 140 K

realized since 1986.



Beginning in 1998, the Speaker and his UK postdoctoral adviser, Prof.

Lance De Long, explored potential applications of superconducting

levitation. At the same time, pharmaceutical manufacturers were

struggling with high cleaning/sterilization costs and intolerable

contamination of products during critical mixing steps in drug and

vaccine processing. The apparent answer to this problem was

“disposable mixing” in sterilized plastic bags, but no optimal mixing

platform was available for plastic bags. Taking advantage of parallel

advances in materials and cryogenic technologies, a prototype

“superconducting levitation mixer” (SLM) was developed by the Speaker

and De Long at UK in 1998-2000.



The basic intellectual property for the SLM was ultimately patented by

UK and licensed to LevTech, Inc., a startup company organized by the

Speaker and De Long in 2000. After many twists and turns in both

technical and business development, LevTech achieved industry

recognition and profitability, and was finally sold to ATMI, a

semiconductor processing company, in 2008 for $27M. LevTech now

produces the second largest royalty stream derived from current UK IP,

and provides the UK Department of Physics and Astronomy with a

much-needed portion of this income.



We will discuss the fundamental scientific and technical issues

associated with SLM development, as well as the equally important

legal, financial and management problems that faced LevTech on its

road to marketing a landmark mixing technology for the world’s

biopharmaceutical industries.

Faculty Host: Lance Delong