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Op-Ed: Gutting IP rights will upend
university research, a font of innovation
[The Center Square] Carol Mimura
The Biden administration recently announced
support for a push by the World Trade Organization (WTO) to strip
intellectual property protections from Covid-19 vaccines.
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 That endorsement, though well-intentioned, should send shivers
down the spines of university and corporate R&D lab workers across America.
Especially since it follows on the heels of some policymakers' attempts to seize
American firms' intellectual property, using a strained interpretation of a
four-decade-old law.
Gutting IP protections would eliminate the incentives for private sector
investors to take initial discoveries – often made in university labs – and turn
them into tangible medicines and medical devices that actually benefit patients.
Advocates for stripping IP protections often point to
successful drugs that initially benefited from research at a university that was
federally funded and thus should be 'controlled' by the government. These IP
rights, however, are currently protected by the University and Small Business
Patent Procedures Act. This bipartisan legislation, enacted in 1980 and better
known as the Bayh-Dole Act, allows universities to own and license inventions
that arose from federally-funded research.
 Universities license IP rights to private sector companies who commercialize
research discoveries and make products available to the public. Before this law,
the federal government (not universities) held the rights to such patents. Some
30,000 of those patents languished, gathering dust in federal filing cabinets,
with fewer than 1 in 20 ever reaching the clinic or the open market.
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For U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh (D-IN) and Bob Dole
(R-KS), the purpose of the act was to "spur the interaction between
public and private research so that patients would receive the
benefits of innovative science sooner." In the ensuing 40 years,
their legislation has enabled universities and industry licensees to
develop and bring to market more than 200 life-saving new medicines.
All have witnessed the most recent fruit of the
Bayh-Dole Act – mRNA technology from the University of Pennsylvania
was licensed to Pfizer and Moderna, who used it to develop COVID-19
vaccines.
I fear that Biden's IP waiver on COVID-19 vaccines, coupled with
ongoing attempts to twist the Bayh-Dole Act to allow government
officials to modify the terms of IP licenses that companies receive
from universities, will disincentivize the private sector from
investing in early-stage university inventions that are years away
from becoming viable commercial products.
If companies fear that the government will
intervene after years of expensive R&D, they will not invest in the
first place.
IP protections exist for a reason – because they work. We must not
allow the admirable quest for health equity to kill the research
goose that lays innovation's golden egg.
Carol Mimura is the Former Executive Director of the
Office of Technology Licensing at the University of California,
Berkeley and current U.C. Berkeley Assistant Vice Chancellor for
Intellectual Property & Industry Research Alliances. This piece
originally ran in the Mercury News.
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