Posts Tagged: "university technology"

A recent Canadian survey (CRA Survey) has conclusively attributed lowered levels of R&D investment in Canada’s innovation ecosystem to the country’s unique judicial “Promise Doctrine.” The Promise Doctrine is a controversial patent elimination dynamic, judicially imposed during patent enforcement proceedings, often after a patented product has achieved its developmental endpoint, having successfully completed its long and costly commercialization. By its unpredictable applicability, like an unseen open manhole, Canada’s promise doctrine can cancel the benefits of a long journey at its market-ready endpoint… As the Survey suggests, long-lasting damage to Canada’s innovation ecosystem may already have occurred, which is why the Survey bears so heavily on the U.S. patent system’s own endpoint “open manhole”, Inter partes review (IPR). However Canada deals with its promise doctrine woes, we too have much to learn from this Canadian Survey.

We create two new companies around academic inventions every day of the year. The critical role such companies play in drug development is clear. The successful integration of public research institutions into the economy is based on the Bayh-Dole Act, which inserted the incentives of patent ownership into the government R&D system. Not a single new drug had been developed from NIH funded research under the patent destroying policies preceding Bayh-Dole. No one is going to spend billions of dollars and more than a decade of effort turning early stage inventions into new drugs or fund a life science startup company without strong patent protection. Yet the patent system and Bayh-Dole are precisely what the critics seek to undermine.

If the UN Secretary General and the members of his “High Level Panel on Access to Medicines” thought the State Department was bluffing when it warned against their attempt to make intellectual property the fall guy for the lack of health care in poor countries, they were rudely awakened Friday afternoon. Disdaining diplomatic niceties, less than two days after the UN report issued, State bluntly replied in a statement titled “U.S. Disappointed Over Fundamentally Flawed Report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines.” Compounding the pain, the same day five prominent university associations issued a joint paper taking the report apart. Being directly and publicly rebuked in this manner is a new experience for the Secretary General and his minions– but one they richly deserve.

Another incursion into research university governance and operations is now underway. And this time all research universities are affected. Led by the DC Based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leftist anti-patent activist coalition that has initiated a 50-state legislative campaign to shrink research university patent licensing rights at the state level. (See) The measure’s purported objective is to prevent publicly funded university research patents from being licensed to so-called “Patent Assertion Entities” (PAEs, also known by the pejorative term “patent trolls”). The draft legislation is imprecise, making it even more dangerous than first appears.

The focus of the political advocates pushing march-in may be lower drug costs. But the long-term costs of ripping apart IP rights are far higher and more fundamental than advocates acknowledge. The long-term price of exercising these exceptional prerogatives could include creating a crisis in confidence over use of federally funded research discoveries, dried-up private investments where basic research has federally funded fingerprints, hesitation to commercialize university research, and a corresponding drop in start-ups, new products, economic development and technological advancements. March-in could effectively repeal Bayh-Dole.

As we await the decision from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on the petition backed by Senator Bernie Sanders and others urging that the march in provision of the Bayh-Dole Act be used to control drug prices, it’s worthwhile to recall the time the agency followed similar advice….Note from the beginning the trigger for marching in was a failure to work towards commercialization and the word “reasonable” applied to royalty rates, not the cost of a product… To understand the original intent, recall that march in rights were designed to prevent companies from licensing federally supported inventions to suppress them. Otherwise, the government can march in. That’s how march in rights have worked since 1947.

Secretary Burwell and Director Collins are facing formidable pressure to reinterpret the Bayh-Dole Act for the compulsory licensing of costly drugs arising from federally supported research. And the pressure just increased another notch. On March 28, Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken, Patrick Leahy, Sheldon Whitehouse and Amy Klobuchar joined the leaders of the House Democratic Task Force on Prescription Drug Pricing urging Burwell and Collins to hold a meeting “to allow the public to engage in a dialogue with the Department of Health and Human Services and NIH in order to better understand its position on the use of march-in rights to address excessive prices.” If NIH joins in pursuing the swamp gas illusion that Bayh-Dole was intended to regulate drug pricing, we’ll quickly learn that it’s a lot easier getting into this morass than getting back out.

In the middle of February, the scientific journal Nature Biotechnology published a paper from a team of researchers at Wake Forest University which reported a breakthrough in creating transplantable human organs with the use of an integrated tissue-organ printer. The Wake Forest breakthrough provides 3D printed tissues with a biodegradable material to serve as a temporary framework for cells as they take hold in a host body; the tissue material also enables oxygen and nutrients to flow into the printed organ more easily. Still, issues in tissue complexity for certain organs remain, although we are closer than ever to the world’s first 3D printed liver thanks in part to work performed by engineers at the University of California, San Diego.

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.

AUTM collects quantitative data and facts about the benefits of university tech transfer, but the qualitative evidence is actually the most important. With the Better World Report, which just hit 500 stories, AUTM provides evidence that university tech transfer makes a better world. Just look at those stories in the Better World Report; they’re heartwarming. It is amazing that some of the critics tend to overlook or completely discount the very real stories of success. I don’t know what the critics are after— I guess the success of university tech transfer doesn’t fit the narrative that they wish to impose on everybody.

During Reinhart’s year as President much changed at AUTM. There was a concerted effort to transition to a a strategic board of directors that would result in more dynamic member engagement, AUTM hired a full-time Executive Director, the organization spent a great deal of time developing more effective relationships with industry, AUTM bolstered it’s relationships with key university organizations, and AUTM began more earnestly working on international initiatives. While more progress was made in some areas than in others, progress has been achieved across the board. All-in-all, Reinhart’s tenure at the helm of AUTM was quite successful and he has helped set the organization up for the challenges that lie ahead.

February 4 is World Cancer Day… There has been steady progress made in the history of treating cancers of many types since the administration of former U.S President Richard Nixon, according to Dr. Boris Pasche, the Director of the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s Comprehensive Cancer Center. “In my opinion, government should embark on bold new initiatives in cancer treatment,” Pasche said. He did note that, while what President Obama says as a statesman doesn’t change the humbling reality that many cancers have so far stumped medical scientists. Nevertheless, increased investments into cancer research have dramatically impacted survival rates. Over the past decade, most cancers show a better outcome than they did ten years ago. “Bolder initiatives with disruptive approaches to cancer are in order if we want to make leaps forward more quickly,” Pasche said.

Researchers at the National University of Singapore have developed a robotic glove designed to improve patient rehabilitation after injuries or nerve-related conditions that may have affected a person’s full range of motion with his or her hand, such as those suffered by a stroke or from muscular dystrophy. The robotic glove unit, known as the EsoGlove, is mainly made of fabric which is secured to a user’s hand with Velcro straps and a number of soft actuator components. These soft actuators are pressurized by air to distribute forces along the length of a wearer’s finger to encourage natural movements like bending or twisting.

To hear Ars Technica say it is ”a terrible idea” to devote increased funding in order to eradicate cancer is astonishing on many levels. As part of the reason why he believes increased funding for cancer research is a terrible idea he explains that great strides have been made with respect to treatments and cures, which is true. Of course, it is also true that people are dying and they are dying horrible deaths. With the victories and advances that have been made over the last generation it is no longer fanciful to dream of a day when cancer can become eradicated. So why is it a terrible idea to devote more resources on a so-called cancer moonshot to attempt to once and for all put an end to this scourge? For anyone to call President Obama’s cancer moonshot a terrible idea is nothing short of cruel, and is frankly incredibly stupid.

The new year was hardly underway before Representative Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) and 50 of his House colleagues sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell and NIH Director Francis Collins urging them to “march in” under the Bayh-Dole Act to control prices for drugs developed under the law. While the high cost of drugs is a legitimate concern, attempts to address the problem through technology transfer statutes would only guarantee that we will have fewer new drugs, not that they will be cheaper. The march-in provision is intended for instances when a licensee is not making good faith efforts to bring an invention to market or when national emergencies require that more product is needed than a licensee is capable of making, not to fix drug prices.