For many, the main responsibility of college professors is to teach their students and prepare them with the knowledge they need to get a job in their field.
But there’s an entire body of work many professors spend time on that most people don’t get to see, LSU veterinary medicine professor Gus Kousoulas says.
“There’s a disconnect sometimes because the common folk don’t truly understand what university professors do other than teach and transfer knowledge,” he said.
LSU has been near the forefront of universities worldwide when it comes to what Kousoulas stresses is the most important duty for a university professor outside of teaching: generating knowledge through research.
For the fourth time in six years, LSU placed in the top 100 globally in producing U.S. utility patents in 2021.
The list, compiled by the National Academy of Inventors and Intellectual Property Owners Association, had LSU 93rd globally with 32 patents.
Kousoulas is doing his part at LSU by creating a patent for a vaccine that can help fight genital herpes and its effects.
By creating a virus that was unable to enter through the nerves, which is typically how herpes makes its way into the body, Kousoulas said, they were able to use the virus they created as a vaccine against herpes.
“We showed that if you do immunization with this particular virus intramuscularly, you can protect against genital or ocular diseases because one of the most important pathogens that causes blindness in the western world is actually herpes simplex type 1,” he said.
After creating the herpes vaccine, Kousoulas said, he and his research team realized they were able to use it as a vector, or transmitter, to create vaccines for other pathogenic diseases.
The herpes vaccine is now being used as a vector against pathogens in COVID-19, malaria and some cancers, he said.
“The work on how the basic aspects of how the virus enters into cells led to creating this patent as a vaccine against herpes infections,” he said. “The same patented vaccine strain is used now as a vector for providing other vaccines as well as cancer therapy.”
Another group of LSU researchers used their construction management experience to create concrete that can rejuvenate and heal itself in asphalt mixtures.
Using asphalt rejuvenating fibers, an asphalt binder and aggregate blends, a research team led by LSU construction management professor Marwa Hassan and research manager Hassan Noorvand developed materials that can be used in hot-mix asphalt to extend the life span of certain concrete mixtures.
Researchers also developed a patent for creating “bendable concrete” using sugarcane bagasse ash as a key ingredient.
An emphasis on streamlining the patent process at LSU in recent years has led to the increase in patents produced by university faculty.
Andrew Maas, associate vice president for research at LSU’s Office of Innovation and Ecosystem Development, said in a September 2022 interview that the idea was to protect faculty inventions and research while pushing them into commercially successful use.
“Those things that aren’t commercially relevant or that are really crowded in certain spaces, we’re not going to spend time, energy and effort on them because they don’t have a commercial potential,” he said. “The ones that we do spend our time, energy and effort on are really focused on those technologies that have a commercial potential.”
So far, the plan has worked as LSU was the only Louisiana university to make the NAI top 100 list in 2021, though several Southeastern Conference peers in the University of Florida (13th), Vanderbilt University (44th), Texas A&M University (68th), the University of Alabama (78th) and the University of Missouri (84th) joined them.
Kousoulas said patents like his, construction management faculty and others are what LSU should highlight to help the university connect to the community and the world in the future.
“The university needs to increase support toward these types of efforts because it links us to the community when we provide solutions,” he said. “We need to ultimately transfer the message that these LSU professors are not just sitting on their butt, they are actually trying to solve major problems that would help a lot of people.”
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