UAEM North America Responds to news of non-exclusive licensing language in NIH grant at Harvard College
For Immediate Release
Contact: info@uaem.org
May 31, 2023 - Washington, DC: In a surprise revelation from the ongoing Harvard College, 10x Genomics Inc and Vizgen, Inc patent dispute, Bloomberg Law reports that the defendants discovered a clause in the original contract agreement with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) requiring Harvard to license their patented technology with a non-exclusive license.
In reaction to this news, Justin Mendoza, executive director for Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, North America (UAEM) had the following to say, “the failure of Harvard or its licensee to utilize a non-exclusive license as required by the NIH sadly comes as no surprise. However, it is a shame that yet again the agency has failed to use its power to protect the public interest, and that we only discovered this clause through a dispute over intellectual property between private actors. It’s time for the public to get a guaranteed return on our taxpayer-funded investments, in the form of competition and reasonable pricing for scientific products. The NIH could start by enforcing these types of provisions in the future to preserve competition.”
UAEM’s recent work includes efforts to expand affordable access policies that tie the upstream research done at universities to the final accessibility and pricing of the final research project, and efforts to convince the U.S. Food and Drug Agency and NIH to enforce existing laws requiring clinical trial results to be published. Recently, the organization filed a Citizen’s petition with the U.S. FDA on this topic, more details are available here.
###
