An Upland biotechnology company hopes to sell lights invented by Harvey
Mudd College students to fight cancer and other ailments.
UVP Inc. in 2004 hired a team of junior and senior students through the
Clinic Program at Harvey Mudd in Claremont to design systems that
illuminate genetic markers in plants and animals.
For example, researchers genetically engineer tumor cells in mice that
glow when the tissue is illuminated with light from a digital camera,
allowing researchers to track cell growth.
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CariÑO Casas / the Business Press
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Colin Jemmott, left, and Darius Kelly show off
a fiber optic light panel at UVP Inc. in
Upland.
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Lights of most types do not glow evenly. In scientific research, uneven
lighting that is brighter in the center and dim around the edges results
in less accurate data, said Sean Gallagher, chief technology officer at
UVP. The company, established in 1932, develops and manufactures
ultraviolet lights, cameras and analysis software.
"A part of a tumor may look dim when in fact it has grown," he said.
"It's hard enough to do that [even lighting] on a flat sheet of paper."
The use of college students enables the Upland company to save $200,000
to $300,000 a year that otherwise would be paid to two engineers to
perform comparable work, Gallagher said.
"This [student program] allows us to focus on more near-term product
development [in-house]," Gallagher said. "It's harder to hire staff and
start up programs internally."
UVP's Harvey Mudd student team created four prototypes using fiber
optics and specialty lamps. UVP plans to commercialize and sell two of
the students' inventions by early 2006 in a $100 million market,
Gallagher said.
"We may incorporate them into our existing instruments to enhance the
product line," he said. "We feel the technology developed by the
students is ideally suited for several of our imaging systems."
The company has revenue between $18 million and $20 million and is an
international market leader in ultraviolet illumination and fluorescent
imaging systems for protein and DNA analysis, Gallagher said.
Harvey Mudd College is an independent science, math and engineering
school. Its Clinic Program attracted 27 private companies and public
agencies that paid $41,000 this year for students to devise solutions to
33 problems.
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CariÑO Casas / the Business Press
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Darius Kelly, right, is a mechanical
engineering manager at UVP Inc. in Upland. At
left is Colin Jemmott, systems engineer.
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The companies retain all intellectual property rights and sometimes hire
the graduates. The companies retain any equipment students purchase to
conduct research.
In pursuing UVP's project, students used a portion of UVP's fee to
purchase Ray Trace Pro light modeling software costing several thousand
dollars and a sandblaster. UVP transported the four prototypes, software
and equipment from the college to company headquarters May 6.
A team of five students developed UVP's devices over the past eight
months. Two students at Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont applied for
a $100,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to further
develop the inventions.
UVP filed a disclosure patent in March and expects to file a full patent
application this summer. Documents include the students' names as the
inventors, Gallagher said.
The lighting source assignment was UVP's second project with Harvey Mudd
students. UVP participated in the 2004 Clinic Program to create an
ultraviolet lighting instrument that is still in development. That
project netted the company a new employee; UVP hired 2004 graduate Colin
Jemmott as a systems engineer. Jemmott helped put together the proposal
for this year's project with Harvey Mudd, Gallagher said.
"For me the clinic program tied together all of the classes I had been
taking and showed me that I want to be an engineer," Jemmott said by
e-mail. "Rather than having answers in the back of the book, the clinic
is a real-world problem that a company needs a solution to."
Harvey Mudd held a Projects Day May 3 in which students presented 33
inventions in computer science, engineering, math and physics.
Clinic sponsors for the 2004-05 school year included The Aerospace Corp.
in Los Angeles, Fair Isaac Corp. in Minneapolis, the Federal Aviation
Administration in Washington D.C., NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena and Northrop Grumman Space Technology in Redondo Beach.
Harvey Mudd's policy of foregoing all intellectual property rights is
atypical, spokesman Paul Michael Jones said.
