Van Dyke Co-Authors Study Correlating NIH Funding with Patent Production

A new report co-authored by BME Associate Dean of Research and Professor Mark Van Dyke shows the impact of engineering institutions on the patent landscape. The team of researchers compared data from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to link utility patents with grants at institutions that receive NIH funding. They narrowed their search to institutions with more than $40 million in NIH funding and at least 15 utility patents.

They found that the presence of a well-funded engineering unit correlated with stronger patent production. The per-patent costs averaged $15.5 million among those with average funding of $84 million and $11.9 million per patent in the group with average funding of $575 million. Authors suggest this could be related to interdisciplinary collaboration paired with engineering's enhanced focused on translating science into practice.

"Foundational research findings, such as those funded by many NIH-supported studies, have a way of providing useful technologies that are not always presently obvious in the moment," co-author Robert Gourdie told Phys.org. "We hope that our database will assist institutions, such as the NIH and ARPA-H, more effectively achieve their goals of enhancing health, lengthening life, and reducing illness and disability."

The report, "Comparing efficiency of patent production between US institutions using a hybrid NIH–USPTO dataset," was published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.