Brookhaven lab partnering for new LI businesses

Brookhaven National Laboratory, the vast, traditionally secretive energy facility in Upton, is opening itself up more than ever before in its 65-year history -- to the idea of helping develop private businesses.

In the latest such move, BNL and the Melville-based Long Island Capital Alliance, which attempts to connect entrepreneurs with technologies, will announce today a partnership to link research that has been done at the lab with business people who would like to commercialize it.

Last summer, BNL and the Long Island Association kicked off Accelerate Long Island, which has the same purpose: to create jobs on the Island by launching businesses based on BNL's work.

Links between business organizations seem to be sprouting as well. In February, the Long Island Capital Alliance announced a partnership with the Long Island Forum for Technology. The aim is to locate investors for the Island's defense technology companies.

Capital Alliance vice chairman Neil Kaufman said more such collaborations can be expected in the future. "In the past there tended to be more fiefdoms," Kaufman said. "But we're now in the process of banding together and forming [bigger] organizations."

BNL and Capital Alliance will announce plans to showcase six technologies developed at the lab, at a forum in Melville June 8.

"Brookhaven is really expanding its reach all across Long Island," said Walter Copan, manager of the lab's Office of Technology Commercialization and Partnerships. The lab's actions in the last year or so, he said, "are a very conscious effort" to help the U.S. economy. The nation's federal research labs last year voluntarily reduced, to $1,000 from $50,000, the cost to entrepreneurs who want to take options on a lab's technologies. The lab has held two showcases since last summer to present technologies that could be commercialized.

The technology that is furthest along, Copan said, involves medical imaging and diagnostics. A Shoreham-based company called SynchroPET, headed by former state Assemb. Marc Alessi, is developing the technology.

Resi Cooper, the business consultant who is temporarily heading Accelerate Long Island until a permanent executive director is named, said the agreements between the lab and other groups "are exactly what investors need."