Northwestern University’s $700 million Lyrica home run was more than just a stroke of good luck. In a way, it was intended by a federal law enacted a generation ago.
One goal of the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act is to encourage non-profit universities to see the fruits of government-supported research reach the public, often as commercial products. The act allows universities to own rights to inventions made with federal funding and to partner with private companies to exploit those inventions. Many universities have established technology transfer offices to make this happen.
According to the Deerfield-based Association of University Technology Managers, almost 700 new products from research universities reached the market in 2006. While most technology transfer programs cost more to operate than the revenue they bring in, universities view them as an essential aspect of their mission, said Patrick Jones, AUTM president.
“University licensing [of intellectual property] is one part of a university’s knowledge transfer,” Jones said. “Ultimately, the goal is to get things out to benefit the public. The university is a social enterprise with a business constraint. Not the other way around.”
Universities usually charge tuition for courses, but sometimes they give free lectures, Jones said. They also sometimes give away knowledge obtained by research, but sometimes charging for it is more appropriate.
There was a time when university researchers who made discoveries simply wrote about them in journals and let anyone who wanted to exploit them commercially do so, said Indrani Mukharji, executive director of Northwestern’s technology transfer program.
That will usually not work in drug development, she said. “If a compound isn’t protected by a patent,” she said, “most drug companies are unlikely to spend millions to develop it.”
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jvan@tribune.com
See also “Drug find worth $700 million / But chemist finds it a tough sell to turn over project,” Business section, Page 1
