It was the shot heard round the tech transfer world; in fact, it was interpreted by many tech transfer professionals as a shot across the bow, if not a full-force slap in the face. In a brief one-page treatise in the January/February edition of the Harvard Business Review that the stalwart publication cited as one of the top 10 “breakthrough ideas” of 2009, Robert E. Litan, the Kauffman Foundation’s vice president for research and policy, and Lesa Mitchell, vice president for advancing innovation, set tongues wagging and blood pressures rising. What was it about the article that has caused such uproar? It might have been their description of today’s academic tech transfer system as “suboptimal.” Or this: “Many university-developed innovations could reach problem, ironically, centers on the very entities designed to facilitate commercialization.” TTOs, the authors insisted, “are underperforming.” The “monopolistic model” of the TTO has “. . . evolved into a major impediment. Inventive faculty members are hostage to their TLO, regardless of efficiency or contacts.”
The missive went on to theorize that TTO underperformance was evidenced by a declining rate of new drug approvals. “We have a massive bottleneck of innovation on our campuses. Even though federal funding from the National Institutes of Health has more than doubled over the past 15 years, the number of new drug approvals has fallen from 40 to 50 a year down to 12,” says Mitchell. “As the federal government dedicates billions of dollars in research funding to clean energy, we cannot let this pattern be repeated.” Litan and Mitchell propose a “simple” solution to the problem they perceive: a free market for licensing university-developed technologies that allows the inventor to comparison shop for commercialization assistance.
The response from tech transfer professionals has been swift, vociferous, and often emotional. AUTM responded with a point-by-point refutation of the Kauffman claims — and Sen. Birch Bayh himself co-authored a piece in Life Sciences Law & Industry, responding with a succinct “Nonsense!” to claims that free agency for faculty inventors was precisely what Bayh-Dole envisioned.
Perhaps none of the Kauffman claims drew more fire than its attempt to draw a line from TTO activity to the pace of FDA approvals. “This is so naïve it surprises me,” says Wes Blakeslee, JD, executive director with Johns Hopkins University Technology Transfer. “First, even if there was any possible linkage between those two things, it takes years and years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a drug. All you have to do is look at how many licenses have been done this year versus 15 years ago, and it’s probably seven times as many; there is just no nexus with the number of drugs being approved.” Lesley Millar, technology transfer director at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, agrees. “To even suggest that … is nothing short of astonishing,” she says. An in-depth article examining the proposal and the debate it has sparked appears in the February issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To begin a subscription and get the entire article, plus access to three years of archived back issues filled with tech transfer best practices, CLICK HERE.