HSC Profiles
Raymond Bergeron
Patent King:
Helping patients inspires Pharmacy's Raymond Bergeron
Whether you've invented the Next Big Thing or a technology destined to take its place beside a long line of forgettable thingamabobs in the annals of the U.S. Patent Office, few researchers can match the creative achievements of Raymond Bergeron, Ph.D. The graduate research Professor in the College of Pharmacy holds an astounding 119 patents, with another 103 patents pending.
But to Bergeron, a patent is just a piece of paper. Far more important, he says, are what those documents represent, including the two drugs that he now has in clinical trials and the patients they may help. The new compounds, licensed to Genzyme, target liver cancer and Cooley's anemia, a genetic blood disorder for which the current treatment is so unpalatable that some patients forego it even though the disease can be fatal.
Bergeron, the Duckworth Eminent Scholar of Drug Development in the department of medicinal chemistry whose work is funded by the National Institutes of Health, is typical of most UF faculty with intellectual property: He has chosen to license his inventions rather than be directly involved in a company. But that doesn't mean he's been able to sit back in his lab and wait for the royalty checks to come rolling in. If you want to help patients, you have to go out and champion your idea, making what can seem like endless presentations to venture capital groups and drug manufacturers.
“Filing a patent,” he said, “it doesn’t stop there. That's when the game is just beginning. You have to make up your mind that what you just patented is important enough that you’re willing to put in the extra time to bring it forward to society.”
In Bergeron's case, that extra work has paid off, and not just for patients. Two years ago a patent royalty check for $400,000 helped the medicinal chemistry department pay for a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, a key analytical tool that helps investigators determine chemical structure of drugs. Having access to this kind of technology helps keep UF's College of Pharmacy at the forefront of research nationally, says Bergeron. “We have one of the best pharmaceutical operations in the world because there's nothing we can't do here.”
Asked what the secret of his own enormous inventive output is, Bergeron, a chemist by training doesn’t hesitate.
“My secret is being in this health center,” he said, waving at the hallway that connects the College of Pharmacy to UF’s medical school and Shands teaching hospital. “Having an opportunity to interact with the docs, that’s my secret. It’s the Holy Grail. Because you listen to what they have to say, and you say, ‘Geez, I know how to solve that problem.’”
