"It creates a little more comfort in academic research institutions," explained Tom Quinlan, an attorney in the San Francisco office of Reed Smith LLP. He added that the new guidelines would provide "an increased opportunity to get research going or continue." It also would delay questions on "whether the WARF patents are going to continue to be challenged or should have been issued in the first place," he added.
Those thoughts were echoed by John Wetherell, a lawyer in the San Diego office of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP. He told BioWorld Today that the new policies would enhance stem cell research and also "should eliminate conflict" between WARF and its critics.
WARF, the technology transfer arm of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has made three specific licensing changes "to move the science forward," said Andy Cohn, its director of government relations and public relations, by increasing opportunities for private funding and collaboration. "We certainly have heard from universities that this change would be helpful," he told BioWorld Today. "They are our customers, and we're listening to our customers."
First, WARF will no longer charge license fees for industry-sponsored research at academic or nonprofit institutions, regardless of location and intellectual property rights passing from the research institution to the company. That removes a high-cost hurdle to companies, some of which WARF had been charging up-front and annual maintenance payments that totaled well into six figures for funding academic lab research.
