Cloudburst Research co-founder Matthew Brown took this panorama of Serratus Mountain, B.C. using the company’s new Autostitch iPhone application - click for a larger version

UBC Reports | Vol. 55 | No. 8 | Aug. 6, 2009

Fostering innovation in a tough economy

By Lissa Cowan

Cloudburst

Ever wanted to create eye-catching panoramas by combining several photos to make one complete picture?

Dubbed the “first automatic image stitcher for the iPhone,” the Autostitch iPhone does exactly that. It was developed by Cloudburst Research and sold thousands of copies the first two weeks it was released this past June. Cloudburst co-founder Matthew Brown invented Autostitch as part of his PhD thesis research at UBC.

Formed in 2009, Cloudburst is one of 137 spin-offs developed through UBC’s UILO. UBC is a recognized leader in commercialization activities, with technologies created at UBC having generated more than $5 billion in sales. The university currently holds approximately 250 license agreements with companies world-wide.

David Lowe, professor of computer science at UBC and CEO of Cloudburst Research, developed the baseline technology for Autostitch, called Scale-Invariant Feature Transform or SIFT, which has since been licensed to a number of companies. He attributes the company’s success to the help they received from UILO.

“UBC’s Industry-Liaison Office has been very supportive in helping the company to license our research to other companies and in setting up our own company to create a mobile phone product,” he says.

Lowe says the development at UBC of their technology has been instrumental in enabling Cloudburst to take academic research from the lab and develop it into consumer products.

Ostara

Another UBC spin-off, Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, is showing a high degree of success in spite of the economic shakedown.

Donald Mavinic, UBC civil engineering professor, knew early on that he and his research team were developing a technology that was ahead of its time.

The researchers underwent a five-year development process at UBC to find a ‘green’ alternative to depleting the world’s dwindling supply of rock phosphate. The result was equipment and expertise for recovering phosphorus and other resources from municipal wastewater treatment facilities and in doing so recycling the nutrients into sustainable products such as fertilizers. A major benefit of the technology to municipalities was to solve the costly problem of blocked pipes and treatment costs in the plants caused by a buildup of phosphorus and other minerals.

“The world is running out of phosphorus and this chemical element is required for everything that lives on land and in our waters,” says Mavinic. “We cannot survive without it and there is no known substitute for it.”

Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies was founded in 2006 and its flagship product Crystal Green, a slow release commercial fertilizer, is already in large demand from golf courses, parks, nurseries, and the forest industry, which can use the product to boost tree growth. The B.C. Conservation Foundation that works closely with the B.C. Ministry of Environment Fish and Wildlife Branch, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the Greater Georgia Basin Steelhead Recovery Plan, is now using Crystal Green pellets to replace the nutrient value of dead salmon carcasses missing from rivers as a result of low salmon stocks.

The Goldbar treatment plant in Edmonton was host to the first full scale installation to produce Crystal Green starting in 2007, followed by the Durham plant operated by Clean Water Services near Portland, Oregon in spring 2009. Ostara has plans to build three to five more facilities in the next year in Canada, the U.S. and parts of Europe to keep up with demand. Six to eight metric tons of carbon dioxide credits will be produced for every ton of Crystal Green as a result of the technology, which represents a radical cut to CO2 emissions from fertilizer production.

“Countries such as Germany, Sweden, China, Australia and Holland also want to come on board because we’ve invented a better mousetrap,” says Mavinic.

OncoGenex

Martin Gleave, professor of Urologic Sciences at UBC and Chief Scientific Officer of OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals, has a different target: cancer.

Gleave and his research team at OncoGenex, an eight-year-old biopharmaceutical company that started at UBC, are developing new therapies for cancer patients. As director of the Prostate Centre at Vancouver General Hospital, Gleave is also the chief inventor of OGX-011, a drug that was shown in recent clinical trials to prolong the life of men with advanced prostate cancer by seven months.

“The discovery and development of OGX-011 illustrates our capacity to retain and add value to products spun out of the Prostate Centre which, in turn, supports Canadian biotech and economic growth in Canada,” says Gleave.

OncoGenex currently has five products in development. With this second phase of clinical trials showing significant benefit in advanced prostate cancer, the company is well positioned to partner OGX-011 into the third phase of trials for commercial development.

UBC spin-offs Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, Cloudburst Research and OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals are bringing considerable economic benefit to B.C., but also to the everyday lives of local and global communities.

“During difficult economic times it is encouraging to see not only the success of UBC spin-off companies, but also that industry partners are looking increasingly to UBC’s innovation capacity,” says Angus Livingstone, UILO managing director.

For more information about UILO and UBC spin-offs, www.uilo.ubc.ca.