Enacted in 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act provides academic institutions with incentives to patent research findings, greatly increasing university patent applications and efforts to transfer these high-tech advances to private-sector firms. However, a case study published in the December 2002 issue of the Milbank Quarterly, titled “Patents and Innovation in Cancer Therapies: Lessons From CellPro,” points out the practical problems with applying the statute.Authors Avital Bar-Shalom, an American Association for the Advancement of Science risk policy fellow, and Robert Cook-Deegan, director of the Duke University Center for Genome Ethics, Law and Policy, suggest that the difficulties in transferring these patents (and their accompanying technological advances) from universities to industry can hinder the prompt translation of promising research into value for industry and consumers.According to the authors, the Bayh-Dole statute had its intended effect, increasing the number of academic patents and licenses. However, they write, “It has also had second-order effects which have received less attention because information about licensing is not publicly available and few scholars have studied it.&
