Posts Tagged: "Betsy de Parry"

Winning the Patent Policy Wars

We’re in the business of transforming early stage, publicly funded research into useful products. The odds against success are long as commercialization requires years of hard work, a lot of money and some luck. We’d like to think that this effort is universally appreciated. Many in this profession ignore the public policy debates swirling around, thinking that no one will believe our critics or that someone else will defeat them. That’s a serious mistake.

A Reply to the New England Journal of Medicine

The Bayh-Dole Act was passed because Congress was rightly concerned that potential benefits from billions of dollars of federally funded research were lying dormant on the shelves of government. Government funded inventions tend to be very early stage discoveries—more like ideas than products—requiring considerable private sector risk and investment to turn them into products that can be used by the public. Under prior patent polices government agencies took such inventions away from their creators and offered them non-exclusively for development. There were no incentives for the inventors to remain engaged in product development. Not surprisingly, few such inventions were ever commercialized even though billions of dollars were being spent annually on government R&D.

Intellectual Dishonesty About Bayh-Dole Consequences

Prior to the enactment of Bayh-Dole 0 drugs were commercialized from underlying university research. Since Bayh-Dole became law 153 new drugs, vaccines, or new uses for existing drugs are fighting disease world-wide.

Why Bipartisanship Matters

The Bayh-Dole Act unlocked those discoveries that were made with taxpayer money. It allowed businesses and nonprofits, such as universities, to retain title to their inventions that were made with federal funds and to license them to private companies for commercialization. It was a brilliant piece of bipartisan legislation that set the stage for commercializing hundreds of products, including life-saving treatments to which many of us cancer survivors owe our lives.

Bayh-Dole Turns 30, AUTM Celebrates Innovation with Awards

Betsy de Parry spoke of how the Bayh-Dole act affected her personally by lending time and resources to university discoveries that created the life saving treatment that has led her to 8 years of being cancer free. de Parry brought an emotional and very human element to the celebration because she is living proof of what this piece of legislation has meant to so many — it fostered discoveries and drugs that literally saved her life. Her story was quite moving and admittedly brought me to tears. For those of us who have loved ones afflicted by cancer, it gives me great hope that eventually a cure will be found.