Top Universities Rush to Profit From Biotechnology : Life sciences: The industry is on the move in the Northeast, led by Johns Hopkins. Stanford and UC Berkeley lead the West.

The Johns Hopkins institutions, which invented the way medicine is taught, are looking for ways to make big bucks from biotechnology.

For example, when a researcher finds an enzyme in an organism in a hot spring and realizes it can withstand the heat in his washing machine and still get the dirt out, Johns Hopkins is no longer content simply to log the discovery in a journal.

Its scientists are looking for ways to put that knowledge to work, to create products and, therefore, jobs. They call it “technology transfer.”

Abandoning its usual academic aloofness and following the lead of other universities, Johns Hopkins has joined forces with the state of Maryland to capitalize on discoveries and bring jobs and growth to the Baltimore-Washington area.

“When you think about how underutilized the knowledge that’s located in American research universities is, technology transfer becomes a very important subject,” says James McComas, president of the Dome Corp., the commercial arm of Johns Hopkins. “We don’t feel research universities have been mobilized to the extent they should be.”

The effort to capitalize on biotechnology comes as the region’s economy shifts from the smokestack to the test tube.

Ten years ago, Bethlehem Steel was Maryland’s largest employer. It employed 30,000 people during the 1950s, but has fewer than 10,000 on its payrolls in the state. The Hopkins institutions employ 24,500, so they are the state’s largest private employer, said Dennis O’Shea, a spokesman for Johns Hopkins University.

The area is also home to federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, both based in the Maryland suburbs of the capital.

“New Jersey is often referred to as the medicine chest of America because they have so many pharmaceutical companies there,” said Jared Cohen, vice provost of research at Johns Hopkins. “But the biotechnology industry is different from pharmaceuticals, so it’s not too late for Maryland to become a leader.”

G. Steve Burrill, who follows the biotechnology industry for the accounting firm Ernst & Young, said the Baltimore-Washington area could become a major player in the biotechnology field simply because of the institutions located there.

“If you look at biotechnology companies and try to study why they are where they are, it isn’t because there are pools of entrepreneurial talent, or pools of capital. It’s because there are institutions like Johns Hopkins and NIH,” Burrill said from his office in San Francisco. “And that would argue very well for the D.C. area.”

The San Francisco Bay Area is the leader in biotechnology, primarily because of the influence of universities such as Stanford and UC Berkeley. The Boston area is second, and Greater New York City is third, mainly by dint of sheer size. The Baltimore-Washington area and San Diego are the two rising stars in the biotechnology field, Burrill said.

Of the Baltimore-Washington region’s top 50 employers, 16 are in the life sciences field, according to the Greater Baltimore Committee, an economic development group.

“In terms of its future potential for Maryland, it is certainly a key industry,” says Robert Sklar, deputy director of the Maryland Office of Technology Development.

“There are a tremendous number of research contracts awarded and there is a tremendous wealth of talent here in terms of Ph.D.s and biochemists. These people both create jobs and are available to work in biotech companies.”

The Dome Corp. manages Johns Hopkins’ real estate and institutional services, including a venture capital firm, a research park aimed at technology transfer, and a drug and device development center.

The effort has begun to produce results. Since 1986, annual patent applications have tripled, licensing has quadrupled and annual royalties have increased from $153,000 to $1.2 million at Johns Hopkins, officials say.

The patent office is alerted to an average of one Johns Hopkins discovery a week and 10 patents are awarded a year, says David Blake, senior associate dean at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Blake says there are about 60 biotech companies in the Baltimore-Washington region. “The only two areas ahead of that are Northern California in the Palo Alto-San Francisco area and the Cambridge-Boston area,” he said. “But if you look toward the future, in particular where the concentration in molecular medicine is, then Baltimore is going to become much more prominent.”

Although they all conduct research, schools such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford are applied research institutions, while Hopkins is a basic research institution, studying subject areas solely for the knowledge of how things work.

“The mission of Hopkins is to push the limits of man’s knowledge. MIT’s mission is to apply man’s knowledge,” said Barbara Plantholt, president of Triad Investors Corp., a Johns Hopkins venture capital subsidiary.

Her job is to find developmental financing and commercial applications for discoveries. Triad has about $10 million to foot the bill for 15 to 25 projects, she said.

One of the projects is developing thermophyllic enzymes, which come from microscopic organisms that live on the ocean floor near volcanoes and in hot springs.

Researchers hope that the enzymes, which thrive in extreme heat, can be used as a detergent replacement, as an agent to break down poultry wastes and to speed composting.

“The thing with biotech is to figure out ways to expeditiously commercialize the technology,” Plantholt said.