They have set up offices of technology transfer and they are accepting technology licensing applications from private companies. The biological and medical research done at Johns Hopkins University is so vast and multifaceted that probably no one knows exactly how much of it is biotechnical in nature. A UMBC researcher is presently exploring the protein structure of the AIDS virus under a grant from the Howard Hughes Institute. Between the efforts of the region's universities and the fact that major federal research institutions , such as the FDA and the NIH, are located in Maryland suburbs, our state now has the third largest private biotechnology industry in the country. That industry is largely a child of the Bayh-Dole act.
Opinion is divided.
Also in April, ABC News aired a report complaining that federally funded research amounts to a cash cow for the pharmaceutical companies that end up with the patents. Stephen Fritz, Ph.D., head of the University of Maryland, Baltimore's technology transfer office, disagrees. Private companies working through the marketplace do a far better job of that than either universities or government bureaucracies. Besides, these companies invest, sometimes heavily, to change research into products, and they lose their investment whenever things don't pan out. Even if they get a marketable product they have only a few years to recoup their investment and turn a profit before the patent runs out.