NIH to Facilitate License Agreements of Medical Technologies

NIH is reducing both the cost and paperwork requirements for start-up companies to obtain an exclusive option agreement to license the extensive patents and patent applications from research laboratories.

An initiative has been announced to facilitate the ability of start-up companies to license inventions for groundbreaking medical technologies for drugs, vaccines and therapeutics developed by intramural scientists at NIH.

As part of this effort, the NIH is reducing both the cost and paperwork requirements for start-up companies to obtain an exclusive option agreement to license the extensive patents and patent applications from the intramural research laboratories at both NIH and the U.S. FDA.

These new start-up license agreements have been developed by the Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) at NIH. Companies that are less than five years old, have fewer than 50 employees and received investment of less than $5 million are eligible to use the n