The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) recently issued ten patents during October, November, and December for technologies invented at the University of New Mexico. The patents, issued during STC.UNM’s 2018 fiscal 2nd quarter, are for a variety of technologies created by researchers in the Departments of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Computer Science, Radiology, Chemical & Biological Engineering, Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Mechanical Engineering.
Issued Patent for “A Virus-Like Platform for Rapid Vaccine Discovery”
Patent No. 9,803,189, issued October 31, 2017
This technology is currently optioned/licensed.
Inventors: David Peabody, Bryce Chackerian
This technology is a virus-like particles (VLPs) platform of an RNA bacteriophage that is comprised of a coat polypeptide of the bacteriophage modified by inserting a heterologous peptide that is displayed on the VLP. The VLP encapsidates the bacteriophage mRNA as well as populations of the VLPs for rapid vaccine discovery.
Issued Patent for “System and Methods of Resource Usage Using an Interoperable Management Framework”
Patent No. 9,805,172, issued on October 31, 2017
Inventors: Gregory Heileman, Pramod Jamkhedkar, Christopher Lamb
This technology overcomes current limitations of building a generic license language by creating a design space that separates the usage control and access control. The management system is flexible because the user is able, when creating a license, to choose the logic that will be used for usage control specification or access control specification, depending on the need of the application. The system design separates the license expression and interpretation, which allows the same license to be interpreted differently in different enforcement mechanisms and over time.
Issued Patent for “System and Methods for Performing Medical Physics Calculations”
Patent No. 9,805,170, issued on October 31, 2017
Inventors: Roy William Keyes, Christian Romano, Shuang Luan
This technology is a novel process for determining the distributions of energy deposition (or dose) and fluence due to ionizing radiation using a virtual, on-demand computing cluster over a network such as the Internet instead of using local, dedicated hardware. This process relies on the cloud computing model of virtual computer resource access. Calculation parameters are sent from a local client computer over the network to data centers either maintained by existing cloud computing providers or health care specific vendors. The majority of the computations are performed remotely on an allocated computing cluster using the cloud-computing model that may consists of thousands of nodes. The results are passed back to the local client over the network. The local client (e.g., hospitals) will only pay for the actual computing cycles used for the service. Preliminary studies have found with this new paradigm, full Monte Carlo dose calculations with millions of primaries (e.g., photons, protons, or carbon ions) can be completed within 5 to 10 minutes.
Issued Patent for “Mixed-Reactant Fuel Cells with Selective Electrodes”
Patent No. 9,812,719, issued on November 7, 2017
Inventors: Alexey Serov, Plamen Atanassov, Elod Gyenge, Amin Aziznia
This technology is a mixed-reactant fuel cell using anion-exchange MEAs with a non-PGM cathode and anodes and fuels that are non-carbon based.
Issued Patent for “Electrospun Fiber Mats from Polymers Having a Low Tm, Tg, or Molecular Weight”
Patent No. 9,816,214, issued on November 14, 2017
Inventors: Elizabeth Dirk, Shawn Dirk, Kirsten Cicotte
This technology is a novel technique for creating a crosslinkable polymer system. It is applicable to all polymers with glass transition temperatures lower than room temperature, which also contain a photo-crosslinkable functional group. The system is crosslinked to produce non-calendaring 3D porous scaffolds for use in tissue engineering.
Issued Patent for “Rotating Point-Spread Function (PSF) Design for Three-Dimensional Imaging”
Patent No. 9,823,486, issued on November 21, 2017
Inventor: Sudhakar Prasad
This technology is a new technique that yields a 3D point-spread function with the ability to rotate with changing defocus while still keeping its transverse shape approximately constant over several waves of defocus. This new innovation also offers a broad spatial frequency response with 100% power transmission. This approach may also be generalized for other azimuthally symmetric, monomial phase aberrations.
Issued Patent for “System and Methods of Photon-Based Radiotherapy and Radiosurgery Delivery”
Patent No. 9,827,446, issued on November 28, 2017
Inventors: Shuang Luan, Lijun Ma, Zhe Chen
This technology is a novel system for developing a radiosurgery solution for treating local and regional tumors with a dynamic plan. The radiation beam is used dynamically to treat a target tumor volume and has the potential to increase the dose fall-off rate by an order of magnitude.
Issued Patent for “Redundant Component and Intelligent Computerized Control System for Multi-Rotor VTOL Aircraft”
Patent No. 9,828,107, issued on November 28, 2017
Inventors: Arnold Peter Ruymgaart, Lydia Tapia, Aleksandra Faust, Rafael Fierro
This technology comprises “smart components” (e.g. Smart Propulsion Units or SPU’s) that can be fitted on existing airframes and are capable of fault detection and decision making on their own. The whole is controlled by intelligent computerized control units (AI control) capable of machine learning. These units are trained for every possible (compound) component failure event and corresponding change in flight characteristics. In fault conditions, the SPU internal controller autonomously decides on the best action to take with the internally available redundant components.
Issued Patent for “Relativistic Magnetron with No Physical Cathode”
Patent No. 9,837,240, issued on December 5, 2017
Inventors: Edl Schamiloglu, Mikhail Fuks
This technology completely removes the cathode from the magnetron resonator. Instead of a physical cathode located inside the magnetron, the technology showcases a virtual cathode by taking an electron beam and injecting it into the inside cavity of the magnetron.
Issued Patent for “Optimization Methods for Radiation Therapy Planning”
Patent No. 9,844,684, issued on December 19, 2017
Inventors: Shuang Luan, Almeida Riofrio, Daniel Andres Almeida
This technology is a new paradigm for dose optimization that can potentially be the ideal inverse planning algorithm for Gamma Knife radiosurgery and beyond. The method was inspired by the simulation of natural physical models. A challenging 3D C-shaped tumor surrounding a spherical critical structure was used for testing the new optimization paradigm. These tests showed that charges spread out evenly covering the tumor while keeping distance from the critical structure, resulting in a high quality plan.