Principles for disseminating scientific innovations

The ӳ��ý’s mission is to accelerate the understanding and treatment of disease. To do so, we must ensure that others can build on scientific advances made by the ӳ��ý community.

In disseminating our work, our primary aim is to maximize the benefit for human health. We are guided by certain principles.

1. Sharing with academic institutions

As an academic non-profit research institute, ӳ��ý recognizes the unique role that such institutions play in exploring fundamental questions and working on risky, early-stage projects.

To maximize the impact of academic research, our work (including discoveries, datasets, tools, technologies, knowledge, and intellectual property) should be made readily and widely available for use, at no cost, by other academic and non-profit research institutions.

2. Collaborations with industry

Industry plays an essential role in creating products to speed research (such as reagents and technologies) and to directly benefit patients (such as diagnostics and therapeutics).

To ensure that our work ultimately benefits patients, we must partner with industry by engaging in scientific collaborations with industrial partners who share our vision around a scientific area, and by licensing our innovations to industry.

With respect to commercial licensing, our most important consideration is maximizing public benefit.

In most cases, we believe that this goal is best accomplished through non-exclusive licensing, which allows many companies to use innovations and thus compete to bring to market products incorporating them.
In some cases, we recognize that an exclusive license to an innovation may be necessary to justify the level of private investment required to develop a product and bring it to market.

In each case, we evaluate the justification for exclusivity and seek to limit the scope of exclusivity.

3. Policy considerations

To ensure that scientific innovation benefits human health, scientists must also try to ensure that cutting-edge technologies are used in a socially responsible way.
We may place policy restrictions on certain licenses to prohibit uses that would be socially irresponsible based on current scientific knowledge and societal consensus. For example:

Our licenses on biomedical applications of CRISPR gene-editing technologies do not permit their use for .
Our licenses on agricultural applications of CRISPR gene-editing technologies do not permit such purposes as ‘gene drives,’ ‘sterile seeds,’ and increasing tobacco consumption.