Hello! My name is Mauricio and during the month of April, I was a visiting scholar at UNHInnovation.
I work as a licensing manager for the University of Costa Rica (UCR)’s Office for the Management and Transfer of Knowledge for Innovation (PROINNOVA), which serves as its intellectual property licensing office, akin to UNHInnovation’s role in the University of New Hampshire (UNH).
This visit is part of a relationship between the UNH and the UCR that started in 2013 when we invited UNH’s School of Law (UNHLaw)’s professors William Murphy and John Orcutt to visit the UCR and impart a seminar on intellectual property valuation. Since then, we have remained in touch online, and we also invited UNHInnovation’s Marc Sedam last year as a guest speaker in the Costa Rican Second National Innovation Congress, and to visit the UCR.
For this trip, I brought with me two of our licensing opportunities that have market applications in the USA, in order to apply UNHInnovation’s technology transfer process to pursue licensing opportunities with companies we might not be able to reach from Costa Rica:
Alignment Mechanism for Leg Prosthesis
Traditionally, knee-alignment mechanisms for prosthetics need to undergo two or more adjustments to determine the final position needed for the prosthesis. The UCR’s invention requires just one single adjustment, which allows a prosthetist to simultaneously align the prosthesis in several directions (anterior-posterior, medial-lateral, internal-external rotation), thus avoiding the need to make multiple, serial adjustments.
For more information on this invention, please refer to our PCT patent application.
Method for Producing Injectable Formulations of Blood-Derived Protein Materials
There is an increasing demand for blood-derived medical products, particularly intravenous immunoglobulin. The UCR’s method can be performed at room temperatures, has up to a 70% recovery yield, doesn’t use ethanol, and uses a reduced amount of caprylic acid. All of these characteristics make it a more efficient method than the currently used Cohn method.
For more information on this method, please refer to our USPTO patent application.
In the future, we hope to keep strengthening the relationship between the UNH and the UCR, to learn from each other, develop joint-academic projects, and advance our scholarly visits.
Before wrapping up this post, I wish to thank UNH and UNHInnovation for receiving me for this visit; the UCR’s Research Vicepresidency and PROINNOVA for granting me their support; and the UCR’s International Affairs and External Cooperation Office and the University of Costa Rica’s Research Foundation for their financial support.
Please contact me to further discuss these technologies, PROINNOVA, the UCR, or Costa Rica. I can be reached at mauricio.villegas@ucr.ac.cr.
