Social value and global access emerge as new measures for technology transfer

By Ann Silversides

University technology transfer offices are refocusing on creating social value rather than making money, says the director of McGill University's Centre for Intellectual Property Policy. Tech transfer offices have suffered from "unreasonable expectations" about the return on investment derived from licences and spin offs, Dr Richard Gold told an April 20-21 workshop on Universities, Innovation and Global Medicine Access at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the Univ of Toronto.

Many university administrators still expect tech transfer offices to be profitable or self-financing, even though they are generally underfinanced and over burdened, Gold told the workshop, sponsored by the Initiative for Drug Equity and Access (IDEA) at U of T's faculty of pharmacy and Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM). The future of technology transfer lies "less in making university knowledge accessible to industry and more just to make it accessible," he says.

Gold's views were echoed by Ashley Stevens, president-elect of the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), a US-based and dominated network of more than 3,500 technology transfer professionals.

maximizing revenue no longer a priority

The majority of technology transfer offices — 52.3% of the 130 that responded to a survey — lose money, Stevens says. Asked to rank the driving factors behind technology transfer, institutions placed providing a service to faculty first and translating research results second, with "revenue maximization" placing a distant third.

AUTM, meanwhile, is encouraging members to include global access provisions when innovations and technologies are licensed to companies. The provisions involve recognition of the obligation that universities have to ensure any innovations to which they contribute also benefit people in developing countries.

The Univ of British Columbia is the only university in Canada — and one of only four in North America — to adopt formal "global access" principles for its technology transfer. The principles, adopted in late 2007, oblige UBC to "promote global access by entering public/private partnerships to develop new technologies to benefit the developing world." (see www.uilo.ubc.ca)

Health-related innovations are the most likely to provide benefits to developing countries. For example, UBC recently signed a licensing agreement with iCo Therapeutics Inc. of Vancouver, giving the company rights to develop a promising formulation of an orally delivered drug now admin- istered intravenously (amphotericin B) with a potential market in both the developed and the developing world.

Under the agreement, the company would sell the drug, which could treat visceral leishmaniasis (a deadly illness in the developing world) at low cost in that part of the world while in developed nations, the main market is to treat candidiasis.

shift to global access inevitable

Last spring UBC established a protocol that in which senior, not junior, staff members perform the preliminary screening of innovations that might benefit the developing world, Angus Livingston, managing director of the university industry liaison office, told the workshop.

Livingston said his office keeps track of emerging standards in global access provisions and is working to resolve unintended conflicts between the language of licensing agreements, and the intent of the language. "Flexibility and good judgment are needed," he stressed.

The shift towards global access provisions is inevitable, Livingston maintained. "There is a wave coming. We'll all be here in another five years' time."

Meanwhile, he said his office is increasingly operating under the maxim "if we can't commercialize it [an innovation], what can we do to get it out and get credit…How can we make it widely available?"

These days, he notes, "with all the difficulties with the biotechnology sector and venture capital, we have lots of technologies but nobody to license them to."

Barbara Campbell, associate director of industry liaison and innovation at Dalhousie Univ, describes herself as a "global access junkie". Global access licensing of innovations "comes down to tech transfer officers who want to make it happen, who are champions," she told the workshop.

For example, Dalhousie doesn't have formal global access provisions, but Campbell says they are considered or included in every deal she works on. Examples of global access terms include non-exclusive license agreements for research tools, jurisdictional limitations on exclusive licences and at-cost access, she said.

Another approach is having the licensee agree not to assert patents against third parties in developing countries who are selling to publicly funded companies, said Stevens, who is executive director of the office of technology transfer at Boston Univ. He advised that global access provisions be included from day one of negotiations.

While university licensing activity has not led to the formation of many start up companies — the AUTM 2007 survey showed that only 2.8% of invention disclosures led to start-ups — public sector research has made a significant contribution to drug discovery.

"Universities can have an opportunity to impact global access through their licensing policies," Stevens noted.

To that end, AUTM is engaging with external stakeholders active in the global access push (such as the World Health Organization, the UAEM, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). It holds training workshops to create model language for institutions that facilitate global access and publishes the Better World Project, which illustrates stories of how innovations come to market.

US president Barack Obama has endorsed humanitarian licensing policies, Ethan Guillen, executive director of the UAEM, told the workshop.

"Technology transfer should be about getting knowledge out there to be used," Gold told the audience of academics, scientists and technology transfer experts. He added that scientists increasingly complain that the rise in intellectual property protection is hampering their research by delaying or blocking access to much-needed research tools.

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