Technology licensing vs. Product licensing

License are granted for business, products and technology. Business licensing is only concerned with manufacturing, sales and marketing of goods. IP professional are not much concern with this class of licensing. Product licensing relates to transactions that enable a buyer to duplicate and produce molecule or a device that has already been proven by the seller. In this kind of situations, the buyer will need essential surroundings to make profit from the license.
Technology licensing in itself a huge field, actually deals with licensing of non-tangible property rights generated by R&D activity a company and in most of the cases protected by one or another kind of IP. This kind of transactions mainly designate transactions for pre-commercials designs, data, R&D concepts, business plans, method of manufacturing and patents covering them. Technology licensing is becoming an increasingly important transaction category.
As we discussed, technology rights are usually expressed in three important form of IP such as patent, trade secret and copyrights. One of the requisite for technology licensing is technology valuation. It would be assumed that IP protection exists when considering the valuation of technology. Hence, we actually value IP. The extent and strength of IP protection are dimensions of a technology valuation.

Measure of R&D, patenting and licensing is available through Association of University technology managers (AUTM) http://www.autm.org/. But off course, there are some issues with technology licensing. In technology licensing, there is no past history. The issue of forecasting play a major role, all data needs to be developed from sketch. Over all uncertainty in technology licensing is higher then product or business licensing. This difference can be narrowed by skillful due diligence and analysis.

World IP Day Celeberation in India

It was the occasion of celebrating word IP day in India. The joint secretary of DIPP, Ministry of Commerce and Industries, Government of India, Mr. N.N Prasad was addressing the IP community. He told that India is making right move in development of robust IP system and very soon patent office is going to operationalize authority for ISR and IPEA. It is a movement of proud for IP community that India has been awarded such a status.

He told that the government is also putting efforts to protect our traditional knowledge. There has been misappropriation of Indian traditional knowledge in past for e.g. turmeric, basmati and now Yoga. He also discussed about hurdles coming in the way of transaction of generic drugs to other countries, since Indian is one of the biggest generic drug exporter.

Mr. Madhav Lal, the additional secretary and development commissioner for micro, small and medium size industries also shared his views on this occasion. He advised that Indian SME’s need more orientation for protection of their inventions.

The government has come up with various responses from time to time such as national competitive program with 280 crore rupees. This would help in building awareness for intellectual property and creating sensitization in SME plus conducting training. Ministry also has a plan to organize around 150 IP related programs over the period of 5 year and conducting pilot studies which would be a silent feature to support IP facilitation. He told the government has started another scheme under which concept of idea incubation and funding for its nurture has been introduced. Twenty five institutes have been approved under this scheme, assisting 6.25 lakh rupees per year for each idea and each institute would get fund for 10 ideas per year. Award giving program is also introduced. The objective of award is to promote inventors. Finally, Mr. Lal told that main barrier for SME is lack of resources, confidence, reliability and ministry is helping them to come over it.

The next blockbuster in queue..........

Rapamycin (sirolimus) derivative Everolimus (RAD-001) was developed and marketed by Novratis, Earlier the product was approved as immunosupressant under trade name Certican for rejection in heart transplantation and lately it was approved as an drug for treating kidney cancer and currently many researchers are considering the use of Everolimus and other mTOR inhibitors for different types of cancers...so wait for a new cancer blockbuster is not long :)

Licencing deals leader-Q1 to mid Q2, 09 ............ and the winner is

Merck & Co (NYSE-MRK) company with value and vision has been quite active in licensing in different segments in Q1 to mid Q2 of 2009.

Earlier at the beginning of this year in Jan 2009, Merck & Co signed a global strategic alliance with Galapagos (EURONEXT-GLPG) drug Discovery Company in Belgium to develop potential drug targets for obesity and diabetes. The deal potential is $251.7M. Under this term Galapagos will be responsible for discovery and preclinical development of small molecules and Merck will licence each candidate for clinical studies and commercialization on global scale.

After this deal today Merck & CO has signed a licensing deal with Medarex, Inc. (MEDX) and Massachusetts Biologic Laboratories worth $165M, wherein Merck & CO will have exclusive worldwide license agreement for CDA-1 and CDB-1 (also known as MDX-066/MDX-1388 and MBL-CDA1/MBL-CDB1), an fully human Mab combination developed against Clostridium difficile toxins A and b for further treatment of C. difficile infection (CDI).

These licensing deals clearly indicate Merck's interest in biopharmaceutical market and metabolic disorder segment :)

After Pfizer, merck its now GSK .....

Some time back I was reading about John Mckeen who went on to become CEO of world's largest Pharmaceutical company "Pfizer (NYSE-PFE)", Mckeen once said "idle money was a non-productive sin" and to make more money regardless of business line and till now Pfizer has displayed this pure pragmatic approach of making profits with mergers and acquisition ......and next to follow its path is GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE-GSK)....

After Pfizer’s $68 Billion deal to acquire Wyeth, then long time waited acquisition of Schering-Plough Corp by Merck & Co for $41.1 billion came along..... In queue was GlaxoSmithKline and GSK yesterday announced that it will acquire Stiefel for a cash consideration of $2.9 billion. A potential $0.3 billion cash payment will be there on future performance.

In the coming decades likewise AIDS drug collaboration between Pfizer and GSK, we may expect collaboration of these two giants to capture the overall derma segment of world :)

Outsourcing to India

Outsourcing is a need in current economic scenario. Charles Robert Darwin theory talks about “Survival of the fittest" which is shorthand for a concept relating to competition for survival or predominance. By outsourcing work, companies used to concentrate on more important work. Outsourcing is an outcome of globalization of world. We need to see it with a positive outlook”

Patent troll

Patent troll term was coined in early 90's for companies who used to file patent law suits very aggressively, In 2001 this was popularized by Peter Detkin then former assistant general counsel and later went on to become vice president in Intel, it was he who first used it to describe TechSearch and their lawyer, Raymond Niro, while he was with Intel in defending a patent suit against them. Earlier it was detkin who used the term "patent extortionist" to refer to the companies who were trying to mend millions by suing Intel.

Later Peter Detkin became founders of Intellectual Ventures in late 2002, this is quite ironic as intellectual venture is one of the largest patent troll in world and detkin had described the term “Patent troll” in derogatory way while he was associated with Intel.

At present intellectual venture has started its full fledged operations in Bangalore for quite some time and has appointed ex director of IIT Mumbai for its India operations.

Though IPR heat wave has started a decade back in India, but it's going to stay long as bigger patent trolls are making their hub out here in India :)