UCLA grabs the top spot among 225 universities in business creation

Since joining UCLA's faculty in 1988, urology researcher Arie Belldegrun has developed a specialty: starting companies with the university's help. Belldegrun's track record includes selling his first company, the Santa Monica cancer therapy biotech Agensys Inc., for more than $500 million. In 2009, Belldegrun's Cougar Biotechnology was sold to Johnson & Johnson, for $1 billion. He's still running the cancer cell therapy firm, Kite Pharma, which recently ranked seventh in the MIT Technology Review's 2017 list of the 50 smartest companies. Belldegrun, 67, thinks most universities would have forced him to choose between being a full-time professor or an entrepreneur.