The bipartisan Bayh-Dole Act created a framework for researchers receiving federal funds to patent and license their inventions to companies for further development and commercialization.
The law driving technology transfer and fostering innovation
The bipartisan Bayh-Dole Act created a framework for researchers receiving federal funds to patent and license their inventions to companies for further development and commercialization. This benefits innovators across many sectors.
Innovation spurred by the landmark Bayh-Dole Act has contributed trillions of dollars to the U.S. economy, supported more than 6.5 million jobs and led to the creation of hundreds of new life-saving treatments and cures. Before the bill’s passage, not a single drug had resulted from patented inventions generated with government funding. Since 1980, over 200 new drugs and vaccines have been developed through public-private partnerships and technology transfer facilitated in part by intellectual property (IP) protections and technology transfers supported by the Bayh-Dole Act.
Yet some policymakers continue to try and chip away at intellectual property (IP) protections and undermine innovation for patients. The recent passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is just one example. IRA’s Medicare price-setting provisions gut the incentives necessary to encourage risky biopharmaceutical research and development, essentially devaluing IP by allowing for government price controls to take effect years before the product’s patents or regulatory exclusivities expire.
On top of this, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra recently said that the Biden administration is considering using so-called “march-in” rights under Bayh-Dole — when the government takes patent rights from an innovator to let competitors use that patented invention — in an effort to address medicine affordability. March-in rights were never intended to be a blunt tool to regulate medicine prices and have never been exercised. This move would destroy the public-private sector collaboration that Bayh-Dole created and jeopardize America’s place as the global leader in biomanufacturing.
Collaboration fuels the U.S. biopharmaceutical ecosystem and benefits patients and creators around the world. Whether through exchanges of scientific knowledge, research collaboration, or protecting IP with patents and licensing, the United States has been at the forefront of groundbreaking discoveries thanks to symbiotic relationships among academia, government, and industry that Bayh-Dole helped accelerate.
To read more about the Bayh-Dole Act, please view our fact sheet here.
