Harvard Patent Income Steadily Rising

Toiling away for years in the basements of Harvard's buildings, famous professors and nameless graduate students often strive for that elusive sign of success: the patent.

But a patent means more than just the completion of research. A patent can mean money. And that is where Joyce Brinton, director of Harvard's Office for Trade and Technology Licensing (OTTL), comes in.

"We try and find out about inventions that are being made by the faculty," Brinton says. "Once we hear about an invention and get a description, we evaluate if it is something we can get a patent for or if it has commercial application."

Then Brinton's office begins the process of obtaining a patent and finding a good company to hold the patent's license, she says. After that happens, Harvard begins to earn royalties.

The income from patent royalties has grown from $24,000 in 1980 to more than $5.7 million in fiscal year 1994, and continues to grow by between 20 and 30 percent per year, Brinton says.

A large part of that income comes from the Medical School, which produced the patents for Harvard's two biggest money earners, Cardiolite and Sequenase. According to Brinton, while 55 percent of the patents are from the Med School, those patents bring in about 70 percent of the income.

Cardiolite is a substance that uses small levels of radiation to take pictures of the heart. It was developed by Alan Jones, associate professor of radiology, and MIT researcher Alan Davidson.

Sequenase is a chemical that helps researchers find the sequence of molecules that make up DNA. It was invented by Charles Richardson, Wood professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology, and Stanley Tabor, lecturer at the Medical School, and is licensed to the United States Biochemical Corporation.

Cardiolite and Sequenase each earn more than $1 million dollars annually for Harvard.

The biggest money earners outside of the Medical School are two chemistry modeling software programs developed by the chemistry department.

But patents that earn that much are rare, Brinton says. Only approximately 20 percent of Harvard's patents earn more than $100,000 per year.

When income from large patents comes in to Harvard, if is divided among different areas of the University.

If income from a patent is more than $50,000, 25 percent of the income goes to the inventor, 20 percent to the inventor's lab, 20 percent to the inventor's department and 20 percent to the inventor's school, Brinton says.

An additional 15 percent goes into a fund administered by the President's office. The fund is used to "support technology transfer teachniques, or scientific research, or developing innovative teaching methods," according to Brinton.

Stanford's Office of Technology Licensing has a similar breakdown, although it garners patent royalty income of $38 million, compared, to Harvard's $5 million per year. Stanford's royalty income is growing at the same rate as Harvard's.

"Universities across the country are involved in licensing programs like this and are larger or smaller, depending on the type of research," Brinton says. "Stanford has two licenses which bring in over $15 million each," including a patented technique for gene splicing which is used by molecular biologists across the country.

Harvard's OTTL not only oversees the patent creation process, which can take anywhere from two to seven years, but stays in close contact with the companies which hold the patent licenses, Brinton says.

"We like to keep in touch, see how they're doing," she says.

The OTTL follows the company's use of the technique or product, and makes sure the royalties the company is paying are correct, according to Brinton.

Patent Licensing

Licensing a patent to a company can be a complex legal process. While he was provost, Leverett Professor of Political Economy Jerry R. Green headed the Committee for Science Policy, which looked at the relationship between the for-profit world and research funding.

The committee examined ways in which the University accepts funding from for-profit companies and develops "safeguards to protect academic integrity," Green says.

For instance, if a graduate student get a patent which is then licensed to a company, that student holds exclusive rights to continue working on that invention as long as he or she remains in the academic world, Green says.

According to the rules developed by Green's committee, the student would lose those rights if he or she went to work for a competitor to the license-holding firm, the former provost says.

To license a patent to a company, the University must first decide if an invention is patentable and then begin the patenting process before publishing information about the invention, Green says. According to Green, any public information is no longer patentable.

Because maintaining a patent can be expensive, before beginning the patenting process the University also needs to gather a list of companies interested in licensing the invention, he says.