For the first time, Kansas University has cracked the top 100 in worldwide rankings of universities receiving U.S. utility patents.

The National Academy of Inventors and the Intellectual Property Owners Association recently reported that KU was granted 28 U.S. utility patents in 2014, tying for 79th place with Gwangju (South Korea) Institute of Science and Technology. KU is the only Kansas university on the list.

KU now holds a total of 276 U.S. and international patents, with more than 300 patent applications pending, the university said in a news release this week.

Patents sprout from research in fields such as pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, engineering, health sciences and information technology, and KU Innovation and Collaboration markets the technology.

KU currently has 100 active license agreements, and gross revenues from all forms of intellectual property management exceeded $10 million last year, according to KU.

“Patents are an important measure of applied or translational research productivity,” Rajiv Kulkarni, director of KU Innovation and Collaboration, the university’s technology commercialization office, said in KU’s news release. “We are committed to improving society through translated research.”