The Bayh–Dole Act or Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act is US legislation dealing with inventions arising from federal government-funded research. Advocates for leaving the Bayh-Dole Act as-is warn that altering it will scare off companies that attempt to commercialize new agricultural innovations.
Joseph P. Allen has worked to advance partnerships in which private industries commercialize products manifested by the tinkering of public researchers—the Honeycrisp cultivated apple is his example of choice. These types of public-private partnerships were facilitated by the enactment of Bayh-Dole. Allen is now executive director of the Bayh-Dole Coalition, which seeks to protect the law—lately, from some advocates for lower drug prices, who want to change Bayh-Dole to accomplish this. Allen fears these changes will have ripple effects on all the sectors the law touches, including, notably, agriculture.
Once upon a time, before Bayh-Dole was enacted, if the federal government funded university research of any stripe, it held on to intellectual property (IP) rights for the resulting invention, with the eventual goal of finding a company that would commercialize it. The government apparently did a bad job, stockpiling some 27,000 patents it never got around to licensing.
In the interest of getting a lot more inventions commercialized at a faster pace, with the aim of making the U.S. more scientifically competitive, Bayh-Dole was passed. This semi-obscure but significant legislation allowed universities to retain IP rights on federally funded developments; in fact, they were now mandated to make a good-faith effort to turn those inventions into useful products.
Using Allen’s apple example, here’s how the system works these days: Researchers at the University of Minnesota (UMN) developed the Honeycrisp apple by merging the Keepsake and MN1627 apples; they patented their invention in 1988 and soon thereafter, the university began licensing Honeycrisp apple trees to nurseries. However, if UMN failed to license these apples, under a Bayh-Dole statute called march-in rights, the government could theoretically (it has allegedly never happened) “march in” to relicense the patent to another partner.
Click here to read the full article.
Photo source: Dreamstime.com