This month's spotlight takes a look at SATT SE, one of the newly formed SATTs in France transforming the country's tech transfer landscape.
Over the past couple of years, French technology transfer has gone through a complete overhaul.
This continuing government-backed process has resulted in the transfer of many tech transfer offices (TTOs) to the new Société d’Accélération du Transfert de Technologies (Satt) system representing entire regions as opposed to individual institutes.
One such regional office is Satt Sud Est (south-east), which represents Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and Corsica.
Its core activities resemble foreign TTOs, bringing intellectual property from its backing institutions to market and past the proof-of-concept stage, with a focus on life sciences and a secondary emphasis on materials, information and communications, and environmental technologies.
The main advantage it has over previous TTOs is critical mass. In the case of Satt Sud Est, this amounts to more than 10,000 public researchers, in excess of 200 laboratories, 700- plus research teams and an annual research and development (R&D) budget of €600m ($800m).
Founded in January 2012 with €78m from the French government’s Future Investment Programme – the most substantial backing of any of the 12 Satts – Satt Sud Est is a simplified joint-stock company with a number of academic partners and capital of €1m. It counts among its shareholders the universities of Aix-Marseille, Nice Sophia Antipolis, Sud Toulon Var, Avignon and the Vaucluse, Corsica, the Central Engineering School of Marseille, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the National Institute for Medical Research and financial services provider Caisse des Dépôts.
Headquartered in Marseille with a branch in Sophia Antipolis, the company employs 36 people and supports tech transfer efforts through numerous networks. Satt Sud Est works with competitiveness clusters, business incubators and angels, chambers of commerce and industry, and several local development agencies, all with the motive of commercializing technology from leading French institutes.
Olivier Freneaux, president of Satt Sud Est, said: “Our mission at SATT Sud Est is to bring the results of public research in south-eastern France to the market. We offer companies a boost to their R&D, providing them with innovative technologies at low cost together with low financial and technology risks.”
Freneaux said Satt Sud Est includes expertise and skills on the whole tech transfer process, ranging from project sourcing and analysis, through protection of intellectual property and technology development, to licensing and spin-outs.
He says that he is happy with the way the young company has progressed, with 115 projects and 190 patents in its portfolio, adding: “While we have been operating the company for less than two years, we are already very proud of our achievements and results. On the one hand, researchers enjoy collaborating and sending us their invention disclosures. On the other hand, we have already granted companies 12 licences, which vouches for the credibility entrepreneurs and R&D managers show us. We are quickening this pace, aiming for one licence a month on average.”
Licenses granted by Satt Sud Est include a potential HIV vaccine undergoing trials, fibrosis disorder Rx/Dx applications, a geological mobile app and genomic DNA assays.
Overall, the Satt system has generated 15 spin-outs since last year, with Satt SE contributing three to the overall pool. Freneaux says another six companies are in the works, each exploiting technologies developed by Satt Sud Est academic partners.
It will be interesting to see how this innovative new French approach to tech transfer evolves.
