About half of all National Cancer Institute technology licenses are executed within three years of the technology’s initial patent application date, and nearly all licenses involve technologies no older than eight years from the application date, according to the results of a recent NCI study on the influence of patent term on licensing. The results suggest that TTOs at academic, government, and non-profit research institutions seeking to out-license biomedical innovations should continue maintaining unlicensed patents older than three years, but may be wasting their time and money if a patent is more than eight years old, according to the study’s authors. “Our data suggests that it is unlikely that patents which are unlicensed more than eight years after priority patent application filing will ever be licensed,” said lead author Keith Bupp of the marketing and metrics unit of the NCI Technology Transfer Center. “Maintaining these older unlicensed patents by paying maintenance fees — and possibly continuing patent prosecution costs — is therefore probably not usually warranted unless there is significant ongoing development by the NCI.” Bupp presented results of the research during a poster session at the Association of University Technology Managers’ annual conference, held last week in Orlando, FL.

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Posted March 5th, 2009 under Tech Transfer

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