Intellectual Property Rights and Research Tools in Molecular Biology Summary of a Workshop Held at the National Academy of Sciences, February 15-16, 1996 (1997) / Chapter Skim
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PERSPECTIVES FROM DIFFERENT SECTORS
PERSPECTIVES FROM DIFFERENT SECTORS
Pages 57-70
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From page 57... ...
The session provided a forum to address the issues more thematically than was possible during the case study discussions. Gerald Rubin and Lita Nelsen spoke from their experiences in the university as a research scientist and technology transfer manager, respectively; Leon Rosenberg and Thomas D'Alonzo spoke from their experiences with a major pharmaceutical company and small biotechnology company, respectively; and Harold Varmus discussed 57
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From page 58... ...
There are problems when academic researchers get money from industry and when the industrial collaborators impose constraints on when and where people can distribute materials, but these problems are not with patent law. Most academic scientists would agree the patent laws can cause problems with respect to the fair allocation of credit and reward.
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From page 59... ...
UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION Lita Nelsen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology From the perspective of university administrators, the primary reason to license and protect intellectual property is to induce development and thereby make the products of university research available to taxpayers. Nowadays, expectations of economic development resulting from taxpayers' fundamental research spending are much greater.
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From page 60... ...
If an exclusive license for an important pharmaceutical receptor is given exclusively to a large pharmaceutical company that proclaims that it wants to disseminate knowledge widely, but whose licensing practices are so difficult that it takes three years to get a sublicense, it is a less-visible scandal, but it is still a scandal. The right way is not clear.
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From page 61... ...
Funding pressures on all parties will drive them closer together as scientists seek scarce research funds from all potential sources and companies seek to maximize their use of all sources of innovation. Thus, it is incumbent on the academic and government research communities and on private industry to communicate and understand each other's positions better.
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From page 62... ...
Neither rights in intellectual property nor rights for commercial purposes are granted under this type of agreement. MTAs typically state that the recipient may use the materials for their own research purposes only and not for any commercial purposes.
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From page 63... ...
We must continue to engage in reasonable discourse, acknowledge and deal with our differences constructively, and strive to find the compromises that provide maximal support for a biomedical research enterprise that has enormous potential for the alleviation of human suffering. This remains, despite all the problems, a remarkably exciting time for the conduct of biomedical science.
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From page 64... ...
It provides the engine for the biotechnology companies that are revving up across the United States. In the biotechnology industry, venture capitalists perform the service of identifying potential technologies that might be too underdeveloped, too underadvertised to attract the interest of the larger companies, or too far outside their technology area to induce them to displace ongoing research programs and businesses.
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From page 65... ...
Then the discussion with the larger corporate partners begins. For businesses like ours in the biotechnology industry, without the opportunity to establish partnerships with larger companies, we could not raise the money required to bring the technology to the point of availability to a patient as an approved product.
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From page 66... ...
During its initial phase, a biotechnology company must develop both its business and its technology. When a company finally offers its technology to a corporate partner, the proprietary estate is a prominent piece of what is being offered to the larger corporate partner, and it has an appropriate and a correct expectation in that regard.
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From page 67... ...
That episode shows how influences of the marketplace and open discussion of issues can lead to solutions that work. The issue was joined initially because one company had attempted to extract fairly large amounts of money from academic investigators for access to mice for which there were patent claims; but most academic investigators felt that they should have access to these mice because their development was sponsored with public funds.
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From page 68... ...
Scientists using information in the level II database would be required to report discoveries to HGS, maintain strict confidentiality about the sequences, and give HGS options to intellectual property rights considerably downstream of discoveries made by using the database. Although the HGS agreement is certainly legal, I was not enthusiastic about having either investigators on the NIH campus or academic scientists who are supported by NIH grants become involved in it.
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From page 69... ...
Will sequences that investigators obtain only by going through level II agreements with HGS produce more benefits than those studied by academic investigators and obtained free of any attachments from Genbank after being sequenced by Washington University and paid for by Merck? This would be a useful experiment.
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From page 70... ...
1994. Sharing Laboratory Resources: Genetically Altered Mice.
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