

Who Owns the Biggest Biotech Discovery of the Century? (2014) - danboarder
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/532796/who-owns-the-biggest-biotech-discovery-of-the-century/

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themartorana
Considering that much of this research was likely paid for in part by federal
grants and taxpayer money, especially research done on college campuses... I'm
not a fan of watching this "IP war."

In the end, it probably means delayed implementation in to therapies while
companies battle it out in court, followed by insanely expensive treatments
denied by insurance companies all while a few new billionaires are minted and
thousands of people suffer and die unnecessarily.

/end jaded pessimism

~~~
samch
I work in tech transfer office of a major research university. We are
responsible for protecting the IP of our inventors and licensing it. We work
hard to get research from the lab out into industry where it can have the
broadest application and best chance for making an impact. For biological and
pharmaceutical technologies, it can take quite some time to make this
transition, and there is often a lot of risk that techniques which work well
in the lab may fail when scaled or otherwise adapted for industry. Clinical
trials take a lot of time and money, and the FDA review process is stringent.
Those are all risks shouldered by our commercial partners whether they be
start-ups or large multi-nationals. For our part, we need to make sure that
they have the protection they need to carry those risks over a span of years
until a product can make it to market. That protection starts as soon as we
first file a provisional patent for a technology and continues through the
patent lifecycle (continuations, divisionals, international phase, etc). There
is a large cost to this from a university perspective, and we are provided
with the budget to handle that (federal funds are not used to cover the patent
costs).

We are also very selective in how we license these technologies. The split is
generally between exclusive and non-exclusive licensing, and we try to make
the best call given the particular technology we're dealing with. In many
cases, the technology is quite specific and there may only be a handful of
companies in need of it. In many other scenarios we recognize the potentially
broad application of the technology and work out ways to license it non-
exclusively. There are also times when corporate partners aren't ready to bite
due to the lack of maturity of the innovation. In those cases, we can help
spin off startups to continue the development of the technology until it has
reached a stage where it is more attractive to investors.

One of the most important parts of this whole process is the royalty side of
things. Since we are able to protect the IP and license it responsibly, our
office generates a large amount of revenue. That money goes back to the
university in a somewhat-complex system of distributions where the inventor's
department and lab get a cut to help continue their research. Importantly, the
inventors themselves also get direct payouts from the licensing revenue. I
think we can all agree that if we were unable to patent and license their
inventions, then they would not be able to share in the success of their
efforts.

* Full disclosure: We have licensed IP to the company mentioned in this article

~~~
maxerickson
_industry where it can have the broadest application and best chance for
making an impact_

Does impact there ever have a definition other than 'revenue for the
university'?

I realize this is a somewhat pointed question, perhaps even obnoxious, but if
the answer is otherwise, I'm wondering why bureaucrats in a tech transfer
office are the ones deciding when it is proper to forgo revenue for some other
societal benefit?

~~~
samch
By your same logic, why would a researcher devote decades to making an impact
in their field? Is it purely altruistic? Is it because they love to see their
articles cited in journals? Is it because their technologies can be licensed
and put into broad use?

It's hard to picture a case where we would broadly open a patent for anybody
to use at no cost. In cases where that would be the likely outcome, we simply
won't bother patenting the technology, and allow it to be published without
protection if the researcher so chooses.

We are no blindly profit-seeking on behalf of the university, however. We are
good partners in negotiation and understand the cases where certain
technologies might have immense value to some but won't generate a large
amount for the university. We often invest a lot of time and money into
technologies that don't necessarily end up making the impact our researchers
had hoped. Maybe the tech couldn't be adapted to work at scale or maybe it
couldn't pass clinical trials. There are also the cases where we work hard to
find partners for orphan drugs. That is a critical area of medicine that in by
no means lucrative, but it can make a huge impact to a small population of
patients. One success we've had in that area was Myozyme [1].

And not to be pedantic, but since we're on HN, I figured I'd clarify that we
really don't fit any accepted definition of bureaucratic [2].

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alglucosidase_alfa](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alglucosidase_alfa)

2\. [http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/bureaucracy](http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/bureaucracy)

~~~
maxerickson
[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bureaucracy](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bureaucracy)

 _the body of officials and administrators, especially of a government or
government department._

Of course you aren't a government department, but you are a body of
administrators at a publicly funded institution.

I don't mind that universities license technology in order to capture revenue.
What I don't like is obfuscating the activity behind words like 'impact'.

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fsloth
This is probably the CRISPR technique article is talking about
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR)

" By delivering the Cas9 protein and appropriate guide RNAs into a cell, the
organism's genome can be cut at any desired location."

Holy crap, I had no idea the field was this advanced.

~~~
joeyspn
Yes, there were a couple of threads about this few days ago...
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9235912](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9235912)

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streptomycin
At
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asilomar_Conference_on_Recombin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asilomar_Conference_on_Recombinant_DNA)
in 1975 scientists agreed to a moratorium on certain types of genetic
research. Basically everyone agreed.

I don't know how true it is, but a professor of mine who was active in this
type of research back then said that as soon as the moratorium expired,
everyone published all these fantastic results from huge complicated
experiments that they had very obviously been doing during the moratorium.

It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle.

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ilamont
This is almost entirely sourced from the MIT Technology Review's original
reporting:

[http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/532796/who-
own...](http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/532796/who-owns-the-
biggest-biotech-discovery-of-the-century/)

~~~
sctb
Thanks, we updated the link from [http://www.fiercebiotech.com/story/who-
really-controls-revol...](http://www.fiercebiotech.com/story/who-really-
controls-revolutionary-new-crispr-cas9-technology/2014-12-05).

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noname123
Was wondering if someone can give a layman's explanation of how CRISPR gene
editing works and its potential applications?

Not trying to start any startup, instead just trying to learn more about
CRISPR...

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jforman
"Zhang--who maintains he did the work independently"

So he has a wet lab at home? color me skeptical.

But I suppose you might as well do what you can to get a slice of a multi-
billion dollar pie.

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refurb
He doesn't mean independently from the university he works at, he means
independently from the other researchers who also discovered the technology.

~~~
jforman
Either way the university owns the IP regardless of who the "inventor" on the
patent is, so why is this relevant?

~~~
refurb
Because universities commonly provide exclusive out-licensing for the patents
they own? The inventor here started his own company based on the work the
university owns.

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irascible
That website. Omfg.

