American Conference Institute will present its "Pharma/Biotech Industry Forum on Patent Portfolio Management" conference in New York City on February 27-28, 2007.
Many commercialized drugs are born in universities. Pharma/biotech companies face budget constraints, so they turn to universities to come up with early-stage drugs that the companies then refine. But such tech transfer deals between industry and universities are not being made as frequently as they should be. Each side is struggling with how to bridge the technology/innovation gap between discovery and commercialization.
Years ago, the model was as follows: a university would have early-stage venture capitalists start companies on concepts or exciting results. Some would succeed and many would fail, but then those technologies would form the pipeline picked up by established companies. This model no longer works. Companies and VCs now want phase II drugs and/or want to license discoveries further along in the pipeline, and this is not what universities do. Companies and VCs have moved away from licensing early-stage life science technologies, and these are exactly the types of discoveries that universities are seeking to license. The result: it’s more difficult to get deals done and company pipelines are bare.
The Pharma/Biotech Industry Forum on Patent Portfolio Management will address the ongoing concern associated with how the target market (collectively) gets promising early scientific results developed to the point where a company wishes to take over the project. Another topic will be the inherent culture clash between industry and academia: academia wants to educate, disseminate and publish, and industry wants to gain competitive advantage from control over the IP.
The conference is targeted at licensing executives and in-house counsel for medium-to-large biotechnology companies and large pharmaceutical companies, as well as research institutions with technology transfer/licensing offices, and outside attorneys who represent any of the parties to such deals.
Additional details are available at the conference website.
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