BNL technologies turn into business deals

Some of those technologies Brookhaven National Lab put on display this past summer are close to turning into business deals between the lab and investors, executives and entrepreneurs, a top BNL official said Tuesday.

The lab offered about a dozen technologies invented by its scientists to investors and others who would seek to make businesses out of them under a licensing agreement with BNL.

Walter Copan, BNL's managing director of technology commercialization and partnerships, said the lab is "negotiating deals" with investors on Long Island and in Silicon Valley for several of the technologies. One is RatCap, an imaging system to be used to diagnose diseases in small animals. RatCap stands for Rat Conscious Animal PET (positron emission tomography). Another is a solar-cell technology.

Copan said he hopes to sign deals by the end of the year, "We're very optimistic," he said.