Missed potential? Why Academics should always be thinking about the greater potential of their research.

By Sara Holland, Patent Attorney, Potter Clarkson

The UK is rightly proud of its academic excellence.  The cross-sector biotech/synthetic biology/industrial-biotechnology (pick your favourite term) research being done at the UK’s universities and institutes has the potential to make significant contributions to many global issues, such as food security and climate change.

However, the key word here is “potential”. 

There are many hurdles that research has to overcome before it can be turned into a real-world product and have a real-world impact, with scale-up being a commonly cited one.

The issue I want to talk about arises much earlier than this - at the point where a new invention is still ethereal - lurking there in a lab book or graph, waiting to be crystallised – but which gets ignored because it wasn’t what the scientist expected, or doesn’t fit the research plan.

Academic researchers are usually funded for a specific project (e.g. identifying some new aspect of fundamental biology), and so are understandably highly focussed on those goals.  The ultimate aim being to publish high-impact academic papers.  This is the way.

My career has consisted of around twelve years in academic research, and eight years as a patent attorney, and I now see that aspect of academia does not foster the mindset needed to go beyond the box and “invention spot”.  Not enough money.  Not enough opportunities for junior researchers to do independent research.

Of course, there are some very entrepreneurial academics, and I have the pleasure of working with a number of them. However, for every one of these there are a large number of scientists doing very good research – many of them far below PI level -  but who are not thinking about the greater potential of their research.

The reasons for this are many, but based on my own personal experience, both in the lab and in the interactions I have had since with scientists at universities, it comes down to a lack of understanding as to how the commercial world works, and how products reach market.

A lack of understanding that if you do simply publish your research, even if it is in Nature, the chances of that research being developed into something that has an impact on the world is low.  The commercial world outside of academia does not want to invest a lot of money to develop a technology that can simply be ripped off by a competitor.  This is where patents come in.

So we need our scientists to have some basic appreciation of patents and what a new “invention” has to look like for a patent to be granted.  The scientist is then in a better position to think “I should talk to my TTO about this”. 

I guarantee there will have been many missed opportunities to release impactful research into the world because a researcher thinks “someone has already done this” –without any basis upon which to reach that conclusion.

If we don’t capture these inventions at conception, then we can never fully realise the UK’s academic research potential.

Data I obtained whilst investigating the role of chromium on mistranslation in yeast.  Data shows that chromium does likely affect translational accuracy – the aim of the project. 

But the data also shows that chromium and an antibiotic, when applied in combination at individual sub-inhibitory concentrations is lethal to yeast. A potential anti-cancer combination? A new anti-fungal therapeutic? A plant-protection product?