Recently, the Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine has completed a public announcement and authorized a Shanghai biotechnology company to implement an exclusive license for the Chinese invention patent “Antibody heavy chain constant region sequence for enhancing the activity of agonistic antibody” and its international family of patents. The total contract amount is about 300 million yuan, plus a sales commission.
In 2019, the other targets of this Chinese patent were exclusively licensed to a company in Suzhou with a total contract sum of 828 million yuan plus a sales commission.
“This is the first time I have seen this case of splitting a patent and licensing it to two companies in the transformation of scientific and technological achievements in China,” said Wu Shouren, deputy director of the Shanghai Institute of Science.
Why did Shanghai Jiaotong University adopt a split license for this patent?
It is reported that when Shanghai Jiaotong University started the research and development of this project, many colleagues at home and abroad have already conducted in-depth research in this field. If you apply for a patent based on the experimental data at the time, likely, you will not get a larger scope of protection. To avoid the risk of patent infringement, the intellectual property agency helped design several experiments, used new experimental data to apply for Chinese invention patents, and later applied for patents in the United States, the European Union, and Japan. After this kind of patent value cultivation, the Chinese patent applied by the scientific research team became a “platform-based patent”, covering a variety of tumors and multiple drug targets.
Since it is a “platform-based patent”, the agency company decided to grant the patent rights of each target to a number of companies for implementation through an exclusive license. The financial resources and capabilities of companies are limited. If the entire patent is licensed to one company, the research and development of new drugs for some targets will be delayed, and the split license will maximize the impact of patent implementation and transformation, and effectively avoid the waste of scientific and technological achievements.
A Shanghai company that has obtained a patent for a target indicated that it will use the patented technology to develop innovative drugs with various solid tumors and hematological tumors as indications. They are currently carrying out preclinical research and plan to apply for clinical trial approval to the State Food and Drug Administration at the end of this year. If the new drug is approved for listing in the future, the total contract amount is about 300 million yuan, including payment for R&D and sales milestones.
It is believed that with China’s emphasis on intellectual property rights and policy support for the transformation of scientific and technological achievements, domestic universities and scientific research institutes will improve their intellectual property management and operation capabilities, increase the proportion of patent licenses, maximize the value of patents, and allow Chinese patents to reach the goal of transition from “quantitative change” to “qualitative change”.
