The UK's University of Bristol announced the latest company to spin off from one of its research departments. NeuroTargets, a biopharmaceutical company, is a joint venture between the university and Progeny bioVentures and will exploit gene technologies in identifying and developing new drugs for chronic pain.
Does science depend on wealth creation?
It's another fine example of wealth creation, a driving force in science today. But does it have to be this way? There are still those who ponder scientific fundamentals, and perhaps only the cynical see business pressure on science as unseemly. Science seems to be riding the rapids toward a watershed.
Down one stream, we can ensure that every last modicum of data is patent protected, that intellectual property rights are sealed and hand-delivered to the lawyers, and that the tiniest of results are tightly bound in red tape. Follow the other flow and science is purely altruistic, with fully disclosed, communally peer-reviewed results, and not a lawyer in sight. Certainly, in corporate R&D, the goal is to maximize the value of intracompany sharing and communication. But, society now faces the question of how to maximize the value of publicly funded R&D. Perhaps it is time to consider the massive losses we might face unless we find a way to avoid a split stream and divert those opposing courses back together for the common good.
R&D is torn between the commercial and the purely scientific.
As the recent race to map the genome highlights, R&D is continually torn between the commercial applications and the purely scientific ones. From research grant application to popular science news story, the need is paramount for an emphasis on the potential technology that may be derived from almost any piece of science. If the reviewers or readers find themselves asking the question "so what?" having read the application or news item, then that crucial application aspect of the research has almost certainly been overlooked. How many times do you see a research grant application that claims that the product of the forthcoming investigation has no use? Moreover, in our hype-driven world, what editor would print a story that covers the "who, what, and where" but finds no "why."
The need for a commercial "why" is almost synonymous with that of the scientific "why." Whatever the source of the funding - commercial or public - the purse strings are tugged hardest only by researchers who can answer the "so what?" question the most succinctly.
Only a tiny percentage of NIH's budget comes from royalties.
Is there a need for the research organizations, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy, and national laboratories and their equivalent agencies elsewhere in the world to transfer technology direct to industry, releasing money from the resulting royalties? Budget cuts in federal research mean there is increased pressure on the public purse. One might think that the NIH and its ilk must already make huge "profits" from patent and licensing royalties, but the NIH reported (PDF format; Adobe Acrobat Reader required) that for the year 2000, royalties were just $52 million, a tiny fraction of the organization's $16 billion budget for 2000. In the United Kingdom, too, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) receives about $280 million from the government but garners nothing from royalties. "We do not obtain any income from licensing technology or patents - even if the work has been funded by us," explains BBSRC's Andrew McLaughlin. "Any intellectual property rights are assumed by either the researcher or their institution." Different universities have different policies on this. The University of Cambridge, for instance, allows the "inventors" to keep patents, whereas the University of Oxford assumes them all. New rules at Cambridge mean the university takes ownership of two-thirds of any work carried out on a research grant, which Cambridge chemical engineer Geoff Moggridge sees as a "retrograde step" that won't encourage new spin-offs.
The BBSRC, like equivalent organizations worldwide, cites as its primary strategic objective to "exploit the new opportunities provided by the science of genomics." This is, of course, as ambiguous a statement as one might find, inherent in it the ability to sate both the commercial applicants and, simultaneously, the fundamentalists with the word "exploit" offering solutions to medical problems, as well as profits to those who might sell them. Although it seems, if one reads between the lines, that BBSRC's aim is in fact more noble than chasing hard cash in that it claims a "key driver across our research portfolio is the optimization of knowledge and technology transfer to ensure that research findings are used as efficiently and effectively to support innovation and enhance the quality of life." It is certainly not unique in its aspirations.
There's been a cultural shift at universities.
The Oxford Glycobiology Institute's Raymond Dwek, a glycobiology expert and the scientific founder of Oxford GlycoSciences (OGS), a university start-up, was quoted in the London Times recently as saying that there has been a cultural shift at the university, "The creation of wealth is not incompatible with basic research," he said, "and making a contribution alongside everybody else in society and not just providing the fountain of knowledge." Indeed, Oxford has been particularly successful in spinning off companies from its science departments with such well-known names as Oxford Molecular (now part of Accelerys, a subsidiary of Pharmacopeia), OGS, PowderJect Pharmaceuticals, and chemistry's already highly successful Oxford Asymmetry.
Other universities echo the sentiment. Cambridge, for instance, spun off the likes of electronics and IT firms such as ARM Holdings, Cambridge Display Technology, and Zeus Technology, while the traditionally industrial northern universities, such as Leeds, Manchester, and Newcastle have spin-off arms to assist in the process. The United States has perhaps made the creation of start-ups a fine art, with much of Silicon Valley, the Research Triangle, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology providing a constant supply of companies thriving on technology transfer.
Individuals need incentives.
"There are dangers in the recent enthusiasm to encourage commercialization in universities," laments Moggridge. "The first is that it is rapidly being accompanied by universities and research councils trying to reap the benefits." This, Moggridge believes, is stifling commercialization, and he suggests that instead individuals need incentives to do it. "That means individual academics being the main beneficiaries," he explains. "Without that, we simply won't bother. Our preference will always be publication unless commercialization is worthwhile financially." In other words, the commercialization of science must not be simply a way to subsidize university or research council budgets but a positive contribution to the science itself.
Other dangers cut to the heart of a university's raison d'etre. Universities exist to educate and, although this can be enhanced by having commercially savvy academics, commercialization needs to go hand in hand with an academic career. Academia is quickly coming to terms with its commercial potential, and there can no longer be an institution without some form of committee or department handling the science faculties' intellectual property rights and patents.
Patent stacking can stifle progress.
There are still many problems surrounding patents that can stifle science. Patent stacking in which, for instance, a single genomic sequence is patented in several ways such as an expressed sequence tag, a gene, and an expressed sequence tag can discourage product development because of the high fees payable to the patent owners. "Patent stacking can be inhibitory to investment and progress," says David Porteous, head of the Medical Genetics Section at the University of Edinburgh Western General Hospital. But, is this a critical problem in the commercialization of science? Porteous thinks so, "It can be if there are multiple licenses required with respect to background intellectual property in order to develop novel background IP. One issue is the complexity of negotiations. The other is the cumulative cost of multiple licensing."
The need for commercial secrecy is eroding the potential for collaboration. Sharing research materials, reagents, antibodies, genes, cells, and animals is no longer as easy as it once was because of the legal complexities that arise through the commercialization of the science undertaken with these materials. The office of technology transfer at NIH is building a code of conduct to help overcome a problem that could affect the future course of science seriously.
73% of papers cited by U.S. industry patents are public science.
According to a 1997 study by CHI Research for the National Science Foundation, 73 percent of papers cited by U.S. industry patents are public science, authored at academic, governmental, and other public institutions worldwide. The link between science and the commercial world is increasing rapidly, especially in the United States where patents with U.S. authored research papers have tripled over a six-year period. Governments may be responsible for this increase, according to an editorial (paid subscription required for access) in the journal Nature, but for technology transfer to be successful academics must become entrepreneurs. "Finding the magic formula for the successful transfer of technology from universities and government laboratories to commercial application is a perennial quest of governments around the world."
Peter Cotgreave, who heads the Save British Science Society, feels the link between science and the economy is stronger than ever. "Across the G7, there is a positive correlation between public investment in R&D and private investment in R&D, when both are scaled as a proportion of the national wealth, or for head of the population, or by pretty much anything else," he told HMS Beagle. He emphasizes that higher government funding of basic research usually increases rather than decreases spending by pharmaceutical companies, and this is why economists agree that governments should support basic research.
Commercialization is a useful by-product, not an end in itself.
Maybe the ivory towers crumbled years ago, but can the total commercialization of science benefit wholly the process of discovery for its own sake? Universities everywhere, from Queensland to Kuala Lumpur, now have commercial arms, and there is still no shortage of companies willing to contribute cash to create new research centers. Nevertheless, when science reaches that watershed, we may find academics must be academics. There is a danger that commercialization is an end in itself rather than a useful by-product. "We should aim to keep our best people in universities," concludes Moggridge, "but commercialization is not a substitute to proper university funding; it just demonstrates the value to the economy of education."
This article by DBSW originally appeared in HMSBeagle on BioMedNet in 2001.
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