The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York ("Columbia University") is a private, nonprofit Ivy League research university founded in 1754 as King's College, headquartered at its Morningside Heights campus in Manhattan, New York City. It is not publicly traded, has no parent company, and operates under a 24-member Board of Trustees. Public sources put its FY2024 endowment at roughly $14.8 billion (about the 12th largest U.S. university endowment), with an operating budget near $6.6 billion, some 36,000 students, and about 4,600 full-time instructional faculty plus roughly 13,500 non-instructional staff (2018 institutional figures).
Columbia is a degree-granting teaching and research institution, not a manufacturer. It comprises 20 schools and colleges spanning arts and sciences, engineering (Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science), law, business, journalism, public health, and the medical center, and operates research facilities including Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Nevis Laboratories. It does not sell commercial products; instead it commercializes faculty inventions through its technology-transfer office, Columbia Technology Ventures (formerly Science & Technology Ventures), which licenses or spins out patented technologies. University sources cite latanoprost (licensed to Pharmacia, marketed as the glaucoma drug Xalatan) as a notable licensed technology.
Patent-litigation posture: the tracked data show one case, with Columbia as plaintiff and zero as defendant. This is not an NPE profile — Columbia is a nonprofit university that occasionally joins its corporate licensees as co-plaintiff in pharmaceutical patent suits rather than running a broad assertion program. There is no clustering in plaintiff-friendly venues such as the Eastern District of Texas.
Notable case: Pharmacia Corporation et al. v. Par Pharmaceutical, Inc., filed December 21, 2001 in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, with Columbia named as plaintiff alongside Pharmacia Corporation, Pharmacia AB, Pharmacia Enterprises S.A., and Pharmacia & Upjohn. The suit followed Par's ANDA seeking to market generic Xalatan. On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed (417 F.3d 1369, Aug. 10, 2005) that U.S. Patent 5,422,368 was unenforceable for inequitable conduct, while U.S. Patent 5,296,504 remained enforceable. No merits view is expressed here.