By Dr. Shafiqul Chowdhury
As a professor and veterinary virologist at Louisiana State University, I know how difficult it is to bring early-stage research from the laboratory to the marketplace. I’ve spent decades working to develop a vaccine against bovine respiratory disease, which could save the cattle industry over $1 billion annually.
Yet if a current proposal from the federal government is enacted, it could doom my invention — and thousands of others across the country — to obscurity.
The proposal concerns the Bayh-Dole Act, the 1980 law that made it possible for universities to turn research into commercial products. Before Bayh-Dole was enacted, the government held the patent rights to ideas and discoveries developed at universities with federal grants.
But the government struggled to license those discoveries to private companies who could turn them into practical solutions. Of about 28,000 federally funded inventions patented prior to 1980, the government licensed fewer than 1,500.
Compare that with the output of the Bayh-Dole system today. In 2022 alone, universities patented over 24,000 university inventions and executed nearly 10,000 patent licenses, with the returns from those licenses largely helping fund future research.
Under Bayh-Dole, human vaccine research and development has been especially successful. Animal vaccine research, on the other hand, has lagged behind.
We urgently need to close this gap. Livestock diseases cost the global economy as much as $300 billion annually and threaten food security worldwide. Promising breakthroughs like my bovine vaccine offer hope, but they’ll only make it across the finish line if we keep the Bayh-Dole system intact.
Unfortunately, the government’s new plan would do the opposite by driving private investors away from potential partnerships with universities. The proposal, based on a misinterpretation of the Bayh-Dole Act’s “march-in rights” provision, would allow government agencies to relicense patents on any federally funded invention whenever they object to the price of the resulting product. This change would make it substantially harder for researchers to find companies willing to license and invest in their discoveries.
Successful technology commercialization is far from guaranteed. I worked on my vaccine for more than 20 years before finding a start-up, RTI, willing to license it and conduct trials. Bayh-Dole incentivizes companies like RTI to invest in university technologies by giving them the chance to profit if they succeed — and motivates researchers like me to conduct cutting-edge research despite low odds of success.
If the government could tear up licensing agreements just because someone doesn’t like the price of a product — an idea not authorized under the law — few companies will find it worth the risk to invest their money into unproven technologies.
That’d threaten jobs, our economy, and even our health. My bovine vaccine could save the lives of more than 8 million cattle annually by preventing a disease fatal to more than one in five calves.
Thanks to the Bayh-Dole Act and the hard work of generations of scientists, we have technologies today that we couldn’t dream of 10, 20, or 40 years ago. Consider how many lives have been saved by innovations like HIV treatments and Covid-19 vaccines. But if the framework is finalized, similar life-changing advances may never materialize.
If we want to continue benefiting from the hard work being done at universities, we need to ensure that inventors can continue to bring their technologies to market. That means saying no to the federal government’s misguided march-in framework.
Dr. Shafiqul Chowdhury is a professor of veterinary virology at Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine.
