Carolyn Krause introduced Mike Paulus at the recent virtual monthly meeting of the Friends of ORNL. She has served as the editor of ORNL Review for 25 years and has a thorough knowledge of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's top 10 inventions that have become commercially successful. You see, she wrote about them in the comments. She also wrote this speech and included it in "Historic Speech". Enjoy the conversation.

In 1987, Mike Paulus visited Mike Ramsey at the laboratory of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Ramsey showed him a microscope slide with tiny scratches that formed a channel through which fluid can be pushed by an electric potential. Later, he called this microfluidic device that uses smaller samples for faster chemical separation as a "lab on a chip."

"I think this is the stupidest thing I have ever seen, and it doesn't make any sense," said Paulus, ORNL's director of technology transfer. He speaks to the Friends of ORNL (FORNL) group at a monthly virtual meeting. When he talked with FORNL on the ranking of the top 10 successful commercialization of ORNL technology, he said that the lab-on-a-chip was completed first.

The miniature device was invented by Ramsey and Stephen Jacobson, patented for the first time in 1995, and licensed to Caliper Life Sciences, a company co-founded by Ramsey. Later evolved into the LabChip GXII Touch HT protein characterization system manufactured by PerkinElmer. The device is used by scientists involved in gene editing, drug discovery, and other biochemical separation research.

"Therefore, the lab-on-a-chip included in the LabChip GX Touch is ORNL's greatest success ever," Paulus said, noting that the invention was first marketed as the Agilent 2100 bioanalyzer by Caliper's strategic partner Agilent in 1999. PerkinElmer acquired Caliper in 2011 for $600 million.

Paulus listed 10 ORNL inventions as the leading commercialization success, including the second invention co-invented by Ramsay, which was completed after 1985, because “the laboratory was authorized to license ORNL’s patented technology to The company collects royalties," he said. ORNL has obtained 847 patents and copyright licenses since the New Technology Transfer Office of ORNL Laboratories began tracking the commercial success of its licensees in 1985.

Paulus said that he ranked the top 10 successful commercialization companies based on royalties received from companies licensed for patented ORNL inventions.

"Royalties are paid as a percentage of product sales-this is a good indicator of economic impact," he added. "These ten inventions accounted for more than US$30 million paid to ORNL and 45% of the US$65 million paid to laboratories, but they only accounted for 1.2% of all licenses we executed.

“The top 10 licenses won 10 R&D 100 awards in nine cases, and the other won two of them. These licenses include 200 U.S. and international patents. The portfolio of patents that caused a sensation is large,” he said .

Paulson pointed out that ORNL began to engage in technology transfer in the first half of the 1980s, when these key national technology transfer laws were promulgated: the Stevenson-Widler Technology Innovation Act of 1980, the Bay-Dole Act of 1980, and the Federal Technology Act of 1986. Transfer law. The latter law has the greatest impact on ORNL because it enables national laboratories to sign cooperative research and development agreements (CRADA) and negotiate licenses for companies that patent inventions in laboratories.

On September 5, 1985, ORNL and Cummins Engine Company obtained the first patent license under the new framework. Cummins has obtained a license for ORNL's patented series of high-temperature nickel-iron-aluminum alloys for large diesel engines and turbochargers. The first technology transfer took place two years ago; the patent right of the INOR-8 (Hastelloy N) alloy developed by ORNL for molten salt reactors under the leadership of Bill Manly was transferred to Cabot in 1983 The company, Manly served as senior vice president at the company.

"Most of our commercial success is the result of ORNL's long-term investment and deep expertise, because of the support of ongoing projects from the Department of Energy," Paulus said.

ORNL's second invention in the Paulus ranking is an integrated wireless temperature measurement system for semiconductor process monitoring. SensArray of Santa Clara, California, a partner of inventors Bob Lauf, Don Bible, and Carl Sohns, conceived the device in a bar during a technical conference. The company launched the SensArray integrated wafer wireless temperature measurement system in 2004.

SensArray was acquired by KLA Tencor in 2007; in 2021, KLA Corp. joined the Fortune 500 with annual revenue of US$6 billion.

"This wireless monitoring of wafer temperature based on the ORNL patent," Paulus said, "is still an important part of process control in the semiconductor industry."

Ranked third in the Paulus ranking is the silicon carbide whisker-reinforced ceramic composite material for cutting tools invented by George Wei, Terry Tiegs and Paul Becher.

"These composite materials are very suitable for cutting tool applications," Paulus said. "Whiskers are like steel bars, they provide crack and fracture resistance."

In 1986, as ORNL's second patent license, Advanced Composite Materials was licensed. Cutting tools made of ORNL composite materials were first sold in 1987 and later distributed by Greenleaf Tooling Solutions in the United States and Sandvik AG in Sweden. It is said that the Silar silicon carbide whisker technology used to enhance alumina can manufacture the hardest cutting tools except diamond. This business was acquired by Haydale of the United Kingdom for US$7 million in 2017.

Ranked fourth is the handheld mass spectrometry system jointly invented by Ramsey and Bill Whitten. It was licensed by 908 Devices in 2012, a $150 million initial public offering co-founded by Ramsey. The initial public offering (IPO) ends in December 2020 and has a market capitalization of US$914 million.

Paulus said that the present invention is a miniature ion trap mass analyzer, which is a combination of a mass spectrometer and a microfluidic device, which has been reduced from a bulky desktop system to a handheld system. It determines the identity and quantity of various ions in the sample according to the time during which various ions in the sample are repelled by the electric potential over time.

ORNL’s second invention in the Paulus ranking is a high-temperature superconducting material made with the rolling assisted biaxial textured substrate (RABiTS) technology developed by Amit Goyal and Parans Paranthaman. ORNL and American Superconductor (AMSC) were further developed in CRADA. The patented technology was licensed to AMSC in 2000 and to its rival SuperPower in 2007. The products launched are SuperPower REBCO 2G HTS high temperature superconducting wire and AMSC Amperium wire launched in 2009. Furukawa Electric acquired SuperPower in 2012 for US$65 million.

"Because these superconducting force lines must be cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen to achieve zero resistance, it makes economic sense to install these superconducting force lines in the most densely populated infrastructure or to replace ground cables with no space," Paulus said. We are still waiting for the superconducting lines of force to take off."

The thin-film solid-state battery technology invented by ORNL in the 1990s was ranked sixth by Paulus. The technology was invented by John Bates, Nancy Dudney, and Bernd Neudecker, and further developed in the laboratory with Eveready, Teledyne, and Cymbet's CRADA. The technology is licensed to FrontEdge Technology, Cymbet, Infinite Power Solutions and STMicroelectronics, all of which have introduced solid-state miniature lithium-ion batteries. Compared with the lithium-ion batteries with liquid electrolytes used today, these thin-film batteries are more durable, stronger, and safer.

Paulus said that no battery company has sales of more than $10 million. Paulus pointed out that one of them was acquired by Apple Computer, adding that "this is a strategic acquisition and no way to enter the market has been found."

Paulus ranked seventh in the biosuccinic acid process developed by Nhuan Nghiem and Brian Davison of ORNL in collaboration with scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The goal of the project is to replace petroleum-derived chemicals with substances made by bacteria to produce plastics.

This bio-derived product was initially launched by Applied CarboChemicals in a French demonstration plant costing US$30 million and operated from 2010 to 2014. Applied Carbo Chemicals merged with Diversified Natural Products in 2003 and established JV BioAmber in 2008. However, seven years later when BioAmber switched to cheaper yeast-based technology and established a production facility in Canada, the ANL-NREL process used to make biosuccinic acid became obsolete.

The eighth-ranked commercial success is LandScan, a global population database with a resolution of one kilometer that combines census data with satellite imagery and other information. It is used to estimate how many people are present in the affected area during the day or night. Other uses include urban planning and urban dynamic research.

The patent database was licensed in 2005 and updated annually and was developed at ORNL by Budhu Bhaduri, Phillip Coleman, Edward Bright, Amy Rose and Marie Urban. From 2012 to 2021, when LandScan was converted to an open source license for academic use, East View Geospatial was the exclusive distributor

The content-based image retrieval system used to improve semiconductor yield is the ninth-ranked success. This automatic image retrieval system invented by ORNL called TrueADC can complete the work of 60 human operators.

"This powerful image processing capability is the pioneer of today's artificial intelligence technology," Paulus said. "TrueADC finds anomalies in semiconductors and compares their shapes and features with similar anomalous shapes and features in the database." The identified defects are linked to specific process faults that have been corrected through software.

Ken Tobin, Regina Ferrell, Tom Karnowski, Shaun Gleason, and Hamed Sari-Sarraf’s invention earned August Technology Corp a market value of $4.3 billion in 2004.

Paulus’s 10th success was what he called the "Mass Open Port Sampling Interface", invented by Gary Van Berkel and Vilmos Kertesz. Each surface sampling probe uses a solvent to collect small samples of material. The sample is ionized and injected into the mass spectrometer to analyze the content of the sample. After years of interaction between the inventor and SCIEX company through CRADA, SCIEX launched the ORNL invention, SCIEX Echo MS, in 2020.

The lesson Paulus and his colleagues learned from ORNL’s commercial success is that within 10 years after the ORNL technology is licensed, the company usually does not have significant sales; cooperation is the key, and the facts show that five of them are licensees Supported by CRADA, two of the licensees are companies founded by former ORNL employees (Mike Ramsey); most of the top 10 licensees have a large portfolio of U.S. and international patents, winning the R&D 100 award is a success Good forecast.

As for the technology developed by ORNL in its first four decades (1943-83), Paulus said that “knowledge exchange passed laboratory technology” to industry rather than patent licensing. He cited many examples that emerged from the core roots of ORNL.

In 1946, the first medical radioisotope made from a reactor was shipped from ORNL. In the 1960s, more than 100,000 batches of radioisotopes were shipped from Oak Ridge each year. Today, as a result of ORNL research, more than 40 million nuclear medicine procedures using radioisotopes from various commercial and national laboratory suppliers are performed every year.

In 1947, ORNL developed the Plutonium Uranium Reduction Extraction (PUREX) method to separate plutonium from spent uranium fuel rods in nuclear reactors. PUREX became the basis of French breeder reactors for power generation. Today, ORNL's CSSX process is deployed in the Savannah River National Laboratory's $1.6 billion waste treatment facility.

ORNL worked with industrial partners to develop advanced alloys that are resistant to high temperatures and are still commercially available today. They include Hastelloy N for molten salt reactors, P91 steel for fast breeder reactors, grade 91 ferrite alloys for fossil fuel plants, and aluminum alloys for automotive technology.

Researchers at ORNL proved that centrifuges based on gas centrifuges used to separate uranium isotopes can purify polio and other vaccines to minimize side effects. Today, ORNL engineers are working to improve centrifuge technology.

The Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) designed by ORNL is the foundation of the pressurized water reactor used in US submarines and aircraft carriers and two-thirds of nuclear power plants in the world. ORNL designed, built and operated 13 research reactors and established a school to train future nuclear engineers. In 2020, ORNL released the Reactor Application Virtual Environment (VERA) computer code to guide the design of safer and more efficient nuclear reactors for power plants.

In the 1960s, ORNL researchers established ORTEC to commercialize nuclear detectors and instruments. In the 1980s, ORTEC sold its positron emission tomography (PET) business to the entrepreneur who founded CTI, and Siemens acquired CTI for US$1 billion in 2005. In the United States today, 2 million PET scans are performed every year to help doctors determine whether their patients have cancer, heart disease, or brain disease.

Through knowledge exchange and technology transfer involving patent licensing, ORNL has made practical contributions in the past 75 years, improving the lives of our country and the world.

Thank you Caroline. Among the many inventions that frequently occur at ORNL, these are the most important inventions to be transferred to private companies. Technology transfer is an important part of ORNL's contribution to the national economy.