Tax Policies BIO endorses tax policies that provide incentives for investment in emerging biotechnology companies. Enhancing the orphan drug tax credit to make it more effective as an incentive for research on rare diseases. Enacting capital-formation tax incentives for entrepreneurial firms. Permitting entrepreneurial firms that are losing money and thus have no tax liability to monetize their net operating losses, which, in effect, will allow them to receive current monetary value for their research and development tax credits. Because biotech companies depend on private investments, patents are among the first and most important benchmarks of progress in developing a new biotechnology product.
Patents offer limited protection against commercial use of a company's invention by a competitor.
In biotechnology, patents are critical to raising capital to fund the research and development of products. BIO advocates strong intellectual property protection for biotechnology inventions. Such research is an important source for the basic science behind tomorrow's breakthrough medicines, medical devices and diagnostic products. While NIH may conduct or sponsor basic research, its findings can become a product only through the efforts of private companies that license commercial rights to that research. It is essential that the terms of these licenses be commercially reasonable and comparable to the license terms that one company would agree to with another company.