Feb. 25, 2004 — Recent collaboration between the University of Houston and local technology miner Cyrospace Inc. is yet another example of how nanotechnology is moving from the lab into the marketplace.

But as John Warren sees it, the research behind a product or process — particularly in nanotechnology — doesn’t stop with commercialization. The associate vice chancellor for intellectual property said it’s important for researchers to follow the process through to licensing deals, product development and eventual deployment into the real world.

“This is all so early stage, even when we license it, there’s still continual research,” Warren said. “In almost all cases, we have a license agreement with an accompanying research agreement.”

While accompanying research with licensing in an emerging field like nanotechnology is nothing new, it does show how nanotech, even once its commercialized, continues to evolve, change and open doors in unexpected places.

“We’re extremely hopeful 2004 will be a blockbuster year for us and the University of Houston as we get to the marketplace at least with validation and testing,” said Michael Cyrus, Cyrospace president and chief executive. His company, founded in 1998, commercializes innovative technologies from scientific institutions, government entities, universities, corporations and inventors.

Nanomaterials and tools play prominently in the commercialization deal between Cyrospace and UH, university and Cyrospace officials said.

“We’re hopeful there is a market for both the materials and the tool sets,” Cyrus said, adding that that the first commercialized technologies out of UH may potentially be nanowires and nanoparticles for use in the biotech and environmental arenas.

Cyrus said he is hopeful 2004 will mark an “initial kickoff” of a number of nanotechnology applications that need to get out to users who can check their actual usefulness in the field.

“There are a lot of things going on in the nano arena and a lot of promises, but a lot of it is far from reality,” Cyrus said. “Our approach is not to wait in the lab and push it into the market without concurrent engineering and getting the user’s point of view.”

Jack Wolfe, a University of Houston electrical and computer engineering professor, said it’s critical that nanotech toolmakers look at user feedback on the products they create for the integrated circuit industry

“Ultimately, it’s customer acceptance; it’s just embarking on the step before customers are even aware of a problem they want solved in some cases,” said Wolfe, who works with companies to license and commercialize UH-grown nano and other technologies.

Wolfe, who said it may take a long time for semiconductors to shrink “really small to the 10- to 20-nanometer scale,” indicated that magnetic storage is a more likely near-term application. He described a commercialization process that involved give and take between producer and consumer, recalling a few years back when a company approached the university “to look at pretty far-out ideas” that centered on integrated circuit processing with very small features.

“With the integrated circuit industry, first thing, there has to be a technology relationship,” Wolfe said. “Then there’s a legal relationship and a lot of hard work and then finally it starts to become a product.”

UH’s Warren said one of the biggest barriers to commercialization is the lack of equipment for testing. “We’re having to design and test equipment so they can actually produce something,” Warren said. “It’s so new. Getting from success in the lab to market — that’s a big jump.”

Warren said that with the work in a cutting edge field such as nanotech comes the realization that materials and processes have to sometimes change and additional research is typically required.

Cyrus, whose company runs a massive search engine to match companies looking for solutions to the right technologies, indicated that both the need for, and availability of, nanotechnology products and processes are on the upswing.

“The needs that we see today are tremendous, especially in biotechnology and in environmental and health and sciences and in security,” Cyrus said.

At the same time, he said, the supply of competing technologies, including nanotech solutions, has also increased tremendously.

“Both sides mean it is being pushed out of labs and demanded on a scale we’ve never seen before,” Cyrus said. “We believe 2004 is the year we see some of the results start to come in. The investment is there and we’ve seen it in the last six months. People who did not call us back two or three years ago — now they’re calling us.”