Robert Kneller

The University of Tokyo | Todai · Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology

Background Revealing the impacts of endogenous and exogenous mutagenesis processes is essential for understanding the etiology of somatic genomic alterations and designing precise prognostication and treatment strategies for cancer. DNA repair deficiency is one of the main sources of endogenous mutagenesis and is increasingly recognized as a target...

The diversity of T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoires, as generated by somatic DNA rearrangements, is central to immune system function. High-throughput sequencing technologies now allow examination of antigen receptor repertoires at single-nucleotide and, more recently, single-cell resolution. The TCR repertoire can be altered in the context of infec...

The clonal architecture of tumors plays a vital role in their pathogenesis and invasiveness; however, it is not yet clear how this clonality contributes to different malignancies. In this study we sought to address mutational intratumor heterogeneity (ITH) in adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma (ATL). ATL is a malignancy with an incompletely understood...

As industry-university collaborations are promoted to commercialize university research and foster economic growth, it is important to understand how companies benefit from these collaborations, and to ensure that resulting academic discoveries are developed for the benefit of all stakeholders: companies, universities and public. Lock up of inventi...

Understanding the factors that promote drug innovation is important both for improvements in health care and for the future of organizations engaged in drug discovery research and development. By identifying the inventors of 252 new drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration from 1998 to 2007 and their places of work, and also classifyin...

This paper analyzes the transition to the entrepreneurial university as part of a broader shift to a knowledge-based economy, arising from a complex interplay between exogenous (top-down) and endogenous factors (bottom-up) of a more or less similar nature, combined in different ways in different countries. Drawing on the experience of four countrie...

Following the incorporation of Japanese national universities in April 2004, the ownership of university inventions is now similar to that in the USA. However, in contrast to the USA, joint research projects involving close collaboration with company researchers who are frequently named as co-inventors are common. A large proportion of university d...

Following reforms between 1998 and 2004, Japan’s technology transfer system closely resembles the U.S. Bayh-Dole system. Numbers of TLO patents and licenses and numbers of startups are respectable compared to U.S. numbers shortly after enactment of Bayh-Dole. However, capabilities of TLOs vary, average royalties are low, and business prospects for...

Research evaluation in Japanese universities has relied upon prospective evaluation of competing research proposals until very recently. Over the past decade, the process for evaluating and selecting among competing research proposals, which I henceforth refer to as prospective peer review, has evolved so that in 2006 it is more transparent and bas...

Structured interviews with eight leading Japanese pharmaceutical companies and industry data show that drug discovery in the Japanese companies occurs predominantly in-house. In contrast, European and US pharmaceutical companies rely more on alliances with university-based start-ups and other biotechnology companies for drug discovery. Personnel po...

Why is technology transfer important for cancer and other biomedical researchers? What do biomedical researchers need to know about technology transfer? This report will address these questions in the context of the United States technology transfer system, which is now approximately 20 years old. To accomplish this goal, this report first summariz...

Over the millennia, natural products, mainly of plant origin, have been used for the treatment of diseases, and an impressive number of modern drugs have been isolated from natural sources based on their use in traditional medicine. The past century, however, has seen an increasing role played by micro-organisms in the production of antibiotics and...

Japan's professors usually retain rights to their inventions, but some publicly-funded inventions must be transferred to government to then face obstacles to commercialization. This leads professors to pass inventions informally, without documentation or development or royalty commitments, to companies that have given donations and employed their s...

In the course of collecting biological materials that may be used to develop drugs or other commercial products, what rights does/should the source region, source community or individual donor have to share in benefits from possible future commercialization? The 1992 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity sets forth the general principle...