Tech transfer: Making money out of the cutting edge
In 2016, academic institutions in the US spent approximately $67 billion on research, creating 25,825 inventions and filing 16,487 US patents. These numbers are on the lower end of the scale—the statistics are taken from a self-reporting survey, so not all academic institutions responded.
The annual survey was published by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), a non-profit organisation that supports the academic technology transfer profession.
The more research funding you have, the more invention disclosures you have, explains Stephen Susalka, CEO of AUTM.
In 2016, 7,730 licences and options were executed and 800 new products were created. Over the past 25 years, 80,000 US patents have been issued to academic institutions.
A turning point
Why is technology transfer so prevalent in the US? The Bayh-Dole Act certainly seems to have something to do with its popularity.
The US passed the Bayh-Dole Act, or the Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act, in 1980, jump-starting a surge of technology transfer activity.
The Economist called it “possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century” and noted that it “helped to reverse America’s precipitous slide into industrial irrelevance”.
Before the implementation of the act, any IP generated from federal funding was owned by the government, and the majority of research investment at US institutions came—and still comes—from federal government.
“Unfortunately, the vast number of taxpayer-funded inventions weren’t being commercialised, and died on the vine,” adds Susalka.
He describes the Bayh-Dole Act as a “watershed moment”—the legislation allowed universities to retain the rights to their inventions and commercialise the inventions themselves.
Focusing on pharmaceuticals, Susalka says that before the act came into force, not a single drug or vaccine was commercialised when the government took away patent rights from the inventing organisation.
Post-act, it’s a very difference landscape, with more than 200 new drugs and vaccines having been commercialised through public-private partnerships.
AUTM also reports that only 30 universities had a technology transfer office by 1979. Two decades later, this number had soared to 174.
Importantly (and the subject of some controversy), the government retains ‘march-in rights’, meaning that it can take control of the invention and require the grant of additional licences to other “reasonable applicants”.
The university must also provide the government with a “non-exclusive, non-transferable, irrevocable, paid-up” licence to the invention.
