Last week, the Bayh-Dole Coalition, which includes AAU, honored five innovators whose work helped transform early-stage discoveries at research universities into commercial breakthroughs. Four of the five innovators who received the award have connections to AAU schools. The award honors the legacy of the Bayh-Dole Act and its outsized role in encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship in the United States.
Prior to 1980, patents to discoveries based upon federally funded research were retained by the federal government and very few discoveries were turned into viable consumer products. The Bayh-Dole Act changed that by allowing recipients of federal funding to own patent rights and by encouraging universities and researchers to partner with the private sector to bring new discoveries to the market.
Since 1980, the legislation has led to more than $1.3 trillion in U.S. economic growth, created more than 4.2 million jobs across the country, and contributed to the success of more than 11,000 new startup companies throughout the United States.
Each innovator who received the Faces of American Innovation Award helped turn inventions based on university research into products with significant benefits for everyone. The awardees include:
- University of California, Berkeley Professor Ashok Gadgil who invented a device that uses ultraviolet light to purify water,
- University of Arizona Professor Hong Hua who developed electronic glasses that can help legally blind people see,
- Former Stanford University Office of Technology Licensing Executive Director Katharine Ku who helped develop a model to more “effectively move early-stage university innovations into the marketplace” and facilitated the “industrial application of historic inventions like recombinant DNA and the Google search algorithm,”
- and TeraPore Technologies Founder Rachel Dorin whose research at Cornell University led to the development of membranes capable of filtering impurities out of drugs.
More information about the awardees and their work is available in the Bayh-Dole Coalition’s 2024 Faces of American Innovation report.
Despite the tremendous success of the Bayh-Dole Act, the Biden administration has issued a proposal that would gut the legislation by allowing federal agencies to effectively seize university patents for any product developed with federal research funding that officials believe is not “reasonably priced.” AAU opposes this framework because it would disincentivize private sector partners from licensing advancements made through federally funded research initiatives at universities.
As the coalition’s report argues: “Bayh-Dole doesn’t guarantee success. It simply provides the incentives and authorities needed to transform early-stage inventions into useful products.” Intellectual property rights make innovation possible – undermining Bayh-Dole and the important patent protections that this landmark legislation provides will impede innovations, such as the ones honored by the Faces of American Innovation Award. AAU urges the administration to withdraw the framework and to continue to protect the Bayh-Dole Act.