Four University of Houston researchers named to National Academy of Inventors

Four researchers from the University of Houston have been named as fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

The new fellows include Rathindra N. Bose, vice president for research and technology transfer for the University of Houston and vice chancellor for research and technology transfer for the UH system; Dmitri Litvinov, interim vice provost and dean of the Graduate School and John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the Cullen College of Engineering; Zhifeng Ren, M.D. Anderson Chair Professor of Physics and principal investigator at the Texas Center for Superconductivity, and Venkat Selvamanickam, M.D. Anderson Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Texas Center for Superconductivitys Applied Research Hub.

Together, they hold 134 issued and pending U.S. patents, along with a number of international patents.

Academic researchers are driven by curiosity and the search for new knowledge, Bose said. But we also strive to produce work that can in some way improve the lives of the people around us.

He and the other researchers from UH were among 143 people elected NAI Fellows, representing 94 universities and governmental and nonprofit research institutes. All told, the new fellows hold more than 5,600 U.S. patents. Nine are Nobel Laureates.

They will be inducted March 7, during the annual conference of the National Academy of Inventors in Alexandria, Va., at the headquarters of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Rathindra Bose: Bose, who also holds faculty appointments in the UH departments of Chemistry, Biology and Biochemistry, and Pharmacological and Pharmaceutical Sciences, discovered a new class of anti-cancer agents, Phosphaplatins, which have potential to treat metastatic cancers. They have been licensed to a New York-based biotechnology company, Phosplatin Therapeutics, which is planning to hold clinical trials.

Cancer is a disease of genetic disorder, and hence, it should be treated as such, Bose said.

He believes organ-based treatment is the strategy of the past, and he concentrated on the design and discovery of anti-cancer drugs that address major signaling pathways to shut down the growth of tumor cells by cutting blood supply and selectively killing cancer cells.

He said that Phosphaplatins have been shown to be effective against 96 percent of the National Cancer Institutes 60 major cancer cell lines, and preclinical data show that Phosplatins are equally effective against ovarian, lung and head and neck cancers.