Technology transfer

Panelists before a House subcommittee discuss the changing nature of innovation, patents and the Bayh-Dole Act.

New president of Rochester Institute of Technology proposes alternate way for academe to support business and the economy -- and it involves admitting that your institution won't have a big windfall.

Annual survey shows an increase in the number of inventions, new products and patent licenses reported by universities that commercialize their research.

Getting medicines to people who need them in developing countries is a top goal of public health experts worldwide, many of whom note that people are dying all the time of diseases for which treatments exist. Universities, whose scientists' research is crucial to many of those drugs and which enjoy a share of royalties on some of those drugs, are finding themselves drawn into a debate that has as much to do with the economics of the pharmaceutical industry as anything that takes place in a laboratory.

Last summer, the group representing major research universities endorsed legislation that sought to balance the interests of drug makers and the scientists whose work can translate into new advances in medicine. At least one group, however, is sounding the alarm that the bill would make it more difficult to bring cheap, generic drugs to the market -- at the expense of both American consumers and people in developing countries.

Expanding a college's research enterprise comes at a high price, and don't count on grants to cover it, a new paper in Academic Medicine asserts.

Annual survey of licensing and patents finds that universities created 542 start-ups and generated $2.4 billion in licensing revenue in 2008.

U. of South Carolina's top two administrators, from engineering and public health, start program to offer funds to playwrights, musicians, big dreamers.

In a state known for horse racing, it's fair to say lawmakers have pressed the University of Louisville to gallop into a brighter research future. That encouragement began more than a decade ago, when Kentucky's "bucks for brains" program started matching private dollars given to universities in support of research and faculty recruitment.