The UVic-UCC licenses its first patent to the company LAINCO

The UVic-UCC, with its alumni Verónica Mosquera and Rubén Hidalgo, are the three owners of the University's first patent. They have licensed it to the company LAINCO, which specialises in the commercialisation and development of phytosanitary and pharmaceutical products. The license refers to a patent obtained in 2016 which protects the production process of a biostimulant of plant growth which is applied to the soil in irrigation water, and increases the growth of plants by percentages of up to 30%.

The agreement between the University and the company was formalised at a ceremony at the Casa Convalescencia on Tuesday, in which the vice-rector for Research and Transfer and the general manager of the UVic-UCC participated, as well as other officials of the institution, and the alumni and holders of the patent. The participants on behalf of LAINCO were the company's manager, technical director and director of phytosanitary development. They all spoke in very positive terms about this operation, which was the result of the bachelor's thesis of Verónica Mosquera and Rubén Hidalgo, and was supervised by the third author of the patent, Marta Cullell, a lecturer at the Department of Biosciences of the UVic-UCC and a member of the Quantitative Biolmaging (QuBI) research group.

An example of good practices and a model to follow
The rector of the UVic-UCC, Josep-Eladi Baños, said that the license of this first patent is "an example of the direction in which we should be heading and of how we want to fund research", as it is a benchmark for the university's researchers and will generate revenue both for the University, which will be reinvested in the valorisation of more R+D results, and for the lecturer. The vice-rector for Research, Jordi Collet, said that the experience is an example of good practices of "the valorisation and commercialisation of the UVic's research results, which should encourage the research community to continue on this path of knowledge transfer to bring its research to the market, to society and to people."

LAINCO's goal, as its representatives explained on Tuesday, is to market the product both in Spain and internationally in the countries where the company is present.  They are also committed to the research and development of the patented process in order to obtain new products from which further patents may in turn emerge. Furthermore, neither party has ruled out this being the first step towards future collaborations. For the moment, a visit to the company's facilities has been arranged, and it has recruited the ex-student Veronica Mosquera to its team to carry out the project.

The patent that has been licensed is owned in equal shares by the Balmes University Foundation, the institution which owns the UVic-UCC, and by Mosquera and Hidalgo, alumni of the UVic's bachelor's degree programmes in Biotechnology and Environmental Sciences, respectively. The biostimulant of growth developed is made from non-hazardous bacterial microorganisms, and the growth takes place due to the symbiosis between the root of the plant and the bacterium that adheres to it, which provide each other with nutrients that they would otherwise not receive or which they would receive in smaller amounts.