Dirección de Transferencia y Desarrollo (DTD) — Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

The Dirección de Transferencia y Desarrollo (DTD) is the technology-transfer directorate of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC Chile), created around 2013 to manage the identification, protection and commercialization of research results across the university.

UC Chile has ranked #1 among Chilean institutions for patent filings with the National Institute of Industrial Property (INAPI) for seven consecutive years. The university holds 476 active patents (national and international) and had filed 1,005 patent applications cumulatively as of the most recent public reporting, with 243 granted as of December 2021. The DTD's portfolio has produced at least 24 science-and-technology-based spin-off companies (2018 figures), collectively valued at US$55.2 million with US$23.1 million in annual sales that year; four UC spin-offs — including GeneproDX, a molecular thyroid-cancer diagnostic test — were later featured in Forbes Chile's 2024 ranking of the country's top 100 startups.

Technologies transferred to industry include a functional food ingredient licensed to Alimentos Valle Central and a mining-waste-conversion process supported by companies including BHP and Melón. In 2018 the DTD backed 71 R&D projects with US$6.7 million in funding, 95% of it from government sources.

Caveat: spin-off valuation and sales figures date to 2018 and have not been refreshed in public reporting since; patent-portfolio figures come from slightly different reporting years (2018 vs. 2021) and should not be summed together. No independent economic-impact audit was found — the INAPI ranking (a government body) is the only fully third-party-verified metric.

Read the full analysis: https://transferenciaydesarrollo.uc.cl/