ABSTRACT
The Technology Transfer Office (TTO) should also be able to advice on which commercialization strategy is the most appropriate for the intellectual property (IP) in question. Options include a licence, sale of the IP or a spin-out to a company partly owned by the university which might be a start-up to commercialize this particular IP or an existing company formed by the university and its inventors. In healthcare, because the biology of medicine is interwoven with so many other physiological mechanisms, the establishment of patent claims can be extremely complex. Returning to the question of cost, the TTO also needs to advise researchers on the geographic scope and depth of the patenting as public institutions are not usually able to afford all the patent protection that would ideally be created by a company. A useful guide to the scope of patenting in pharmaceuticals is the incremental cover of territories with significant potential product sales.
