How does an invention or discovery move from the lab to the marketplace?

Communicating market dynamics to researchers is just one function of university commercialization units. Its main function is translating a discovery into a marketable product or service. And that’s not always easy.

Take, for example, a pharmaceutical discovery. Initial drug candidates can take 10 years, or more, to make it from the laboratory through multiple expensive stages of development to the prescription pad, but patents have a limited life of 20 years. For a pharmaceutical company, that’s a big investment proposition for a short exclusivity window. The risk is highest at the early stages of development; that’s why companies are less and less likely to license a patented discovery for development soon after the “eureka!” moment. The pharmaceutical industry in particular finds itself at an important juncture. In 2008, pharmaceutical companies spent an all-time $60 billion on research and development, yet delivered an anemic number of new medicines to the marketplace.