(Press-News.org) ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The law that has helped medical discoveries make the leap from university labs to the marketplace for more than 30 years needs revising, in part to ensure the American people benefit from science their tax dollars have paid for, says a University of Michigan Medical School physician and medical historian.
In a new commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine, Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D., director of the U-M Center for the History of Medicine, looks at the fluke-ridden history of how the law known as Bayh-Dole Technology Transfer Act was passed in 1980. The law made it much easier for research findings made by academics to be patented, licensed by companies and commercialized.
The haphazard history of Bayh-Dole, and the issues and risks that have arisen since it was passed, suggest it is time to re-examine and revise the law, says Markel.
The need for more modern guidance of the process known as technology transfer, and the conduct of ethical and socially just partnerships between academia and industry, was reflected in the recent unanimous Supreme Court ruling that barred the patenting of human genes – though allowed other patents of gene-related discoveries, Markel says.
He traces the history of the Bayh-Dole law, which allows universities and other institutions that receive federal research dollars to grant exclusive licenses to companies that wish to commercialize discoveries made by academic researchers.
Initially conceived as a way to help the United States economy at a time when industry was struggling to keep up with German and Japanese innovation, the proposal only became law because of last-minute wrangling during the final days of a lame-duck Congressional and presidential term.
"The Bayh-Dole Act has had such far-reaching influence in both academia and American society, but it certainly is not a law that should be set in stone," says Markel. "The very passage of the act was based on a series of quirky, historically improbable events, and random and entropic processes. There have been many great things and grave problems that have emerged since the passage of Bayh-Dole, but because the landscape of biotechnologies in universities and industry has evolved so far, so fast, it's time to have a rational, serious dialogue about revising it to reduce the risks the law has created."
Markel notes that partnerships between industry and academia are important, and is not calling for a separation of the two spheres.
Rather, he feels that more consideration needs to the ethics of industry/academic interaction, the need for continued support of basic research, scientific data sharing, and the payback for American taxpayers whose dollars support research before commercialization.
"We're all paying for these discoveries, which can lead to profits for the individual researchers, their institution and the company that commercializes the idea," he says. "But the one investor that can be left out of the profit equation is the American taxpayer."
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Reference: http://www.nejm.org/media/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1306553
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Philadelphia, Pa. (August 29, 2013) – Virtual surgical planning technologies give surgeons a powerful new tool for their most challenging facial reconstruction cases, reports a paper in the September issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).
"Use of virtual surgical planning allows for complex maxillofacial reconstruction with multiple simultaneous free flaps to be preformed reliably and successfully," according to the study by Dr. Adam Saad of Louisiana State University Health Sciences ...
An assay designed to measure normal and abnormal forms of the huntingtin protein – the mutated form of which causes Huntington's disease (HD) – was successful in detecting levels of the mutant protein in a large multicenter study of individuals at risk for the devastating neurological disorder. The report from a team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators – which will appear in the Sept. 24 issue of Neurology and has been released online – also found changes in levels of the mutated protein that might predict when symptoms will appear.
"Our validation ...
(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Glucose monitoring systems with an autocorrect feature that can detect red blood cells (hematocrit), vitamin C and other common interferents in burn patients' blood are better for monitoring care, a pilot study conducted by UC Davis researchers at the School of Medicine and College of Engineering has found. The study was published in the Journal of Burn Care Research.
Burn patients are at risk for high blood glucose levels, or hyperglycemia, due to the body's stress response. Intensive insulin therapy, which is commonly used to keep glucose under ...
Alcohol intoxication reduces communication between two areas of the brain that work together to properly interpret and respond to social signals, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine.
Their results were published in the September issue of Psychopharmacology.
Previous research has shown that alcohol suppresses activity in the amygdala, the area of the brain responsible for perceiving social cues such as facial expressions.
"Because emotional processing involves both the amygdala and areas of the brain located in the prefrontal ...
A recent study by UC Santa Barbara scientists analyzed whole-body fish samples taken from oil-and-gas production platforms and natural sites for heavy metal pollutants. The results showed all but four elements were relatively consistent at both types of location. The findings were published in the Bulletin of Marine Science.
The research, led by fish expert Milton S. Love, a research biologist with UCSB's Marine Science Institute, entailed collecting a total of 196 fish –– 18 kelp bass (Paralabrax clathratus), 80 kelp rockfish (Sebastes atrovirens), and 98 Pacific sanddab ...
Researchers have identified a protein that they believe may help predict breast cancer prognosis, potentially relieving thousands of women at low risk from having to undergo painful, oft-debilitating therapies, while insuring the most successful treatments for those at high risk. The research was published ahead of print in the journal Molecular and Cellular Biology.
Using bioinformatics techniques, the authors showed that the levels of expression of some 1,200 genes that are directly controlled by the enzyme, EZH2, correlates with the aggressiveness of breast cancer ...
In the search for clean, green sustainable energy sources to meet human needs for generations to come, perhaps no technology matches the ultimate potential of artificial photosynthesis. Bionic leaves that could produce energy-dense fuels from nothing more than sunlight, water and atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide, with no byproducts other than oxygen, represent an ideal alternative to fossil fuels but also pose numerous scientific challenges. A major step toward meeting at least one of these challenges has been achieved by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy ...
SEATTLE – A team of researchers led by Janet Stanford, Ph.D., of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has discovered that mutations in the gene BTNL2, which encodes a protein involved in regulating T-cell proliferation and cytokine production – both of which impact immune function – increase the risk of developing prostate cancer.
The findings, by Stanford and colleagues from the University of Washington Genome Sciences Department and the National Human Genome Research Institute, are online ahead of the print issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
A ...
This news release is available in French. Despite all the research done on Alzheimer's, there is still no early diagnostic tool for the disease. By looking at the brain wave components of individuals with the disease, Professor Tiago H. Falk of INRS's Centre Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications has identified a promising avenue of research that may not only help diagnose the disease, but also assess its severity. This non-invasive, objective method is the subject of an article in the journal PLOS ONE.
Patients with Alzheimer's disease currently undergo neuropsychological ...
University of Alberta researchers have found that abundant materials in the Earth's crust can be used to make inexpensive and easily manufactured nanoparticle-based solar cells.
The U of A discovery, several years in the making, is an important step forward in making solar power more accessible to parts of the world that are off the traditional electricity grid or face high power costs, such as the Canadian North, said researcher Jillian Buriak, a chemistry professor and senior research officer of the National Institute for Nanotechnology, based on the U of A campus.
Buriak ...
