New plan could prevent university medical discoveries from making it out of the lab

The National Institutes of Health awarded over $157 million in research grants to Dartmouth, the University of New Hampshire, and other institutions across the state last year. This funding, and similar grants from other federal agencies, help researchers make groundbreaking discoveries across a host of sectors, from life sciences and agriculture to computing and energy.

Yet a new proposal from the Biden administration could prevent the most exciting university discoveries from making it out of the lab.

The plan would give federal officials unprecedented power to interfere in the contracts signed between academic research institutions and private companies. That’d discourage companies from licensing the discoveries made by these institutions, and thereby prevent firms from turning universities’ good ideas into tangible products.

The proposal dramatically reinterprets the government’s “march-in” rights under the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980.

Most Americans have likely never heard of that bipartisan law, which has fueled our country’s medical and technological innovation for four decades. The Bayh-Dole Act allowed universities, other research institutions and small businesses to retain the patent rights on discoveries they made with the help of federal grants.

These institutions could then license those patents to private companies willing to take on the risk of developing real-life products.

Before Congress passed that law, the government took the patent rights on discoveries stemming from federally funded research. And because the government rarely licensed those patents, few companies worked to commercialize theoretical breakthroughs into products. Without secure patent rights, they had no incentive to, as they had no way to stop competitors from piggybacking on their work and undercutting them in the marketplace.

Put another way, taxpayers’ research dollars were advancing our collective understanding of science, but we had few tangible advances to show for it.

Bayh-Dole changed that by incentivizing universities to partner with companies to bring those discoveries to market. Since 1980, the patent licensing — and subsequent research, development and manufacturing — enabled by the Bayh-Dole Act has directly contributed $1 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product and supported 6.5 million jobs. The law has been especially impactful in life sciences, leading to the development of more than 200 vaccines and life-saving drugs.

One notable example of these drugs is infliximab, which originated from research at New York University School of Medicine and was later licensed and commercialized by Janssen Biotech, now part of Johnson & Johnson, in 1998. The medicine is commonly used to treat certain forms of arthritis, which affects roughly 280,000 New Hampshire residents and one in four U.S. adults nationwide.

If the Biden administration’s proposal were in place in the 1990s, this medicine might not have made it to patients, as companies would have had very little reason to risk capital on federally funded research. Why spend billions of dollars, and more than a decade, bringing a new technology to market if the government can simply snatch the patent rights as soon as it reaches the shelves?

That is, effectively, what the new plan envisions. Drugs and other technologies would once again never make it out of university laboratories, and American patients would be at the brunt of the medical drought.

New treatments for arthritis and other diseases are just around the corner. But no matter how promising the science, those prospective treatments will never reach patients if the administration gets its way.

Julia Moore is executive director of Rhode Island and Northern New England for the Arthritis Foundation.