Technology Transfer
Submitted by pratyesh on Tue, 03/11/2008 - 09:27.
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The term ‘Technology Transfer’ changed the view of multinational pharmaceutical industries towards the developing countries. Intellectual properties are amongst the powers which make the nations grow.
Research and Development (R & D) plays a vital role in creating these intellectual property-based technologies. Technology transfer will help developing countries attain economical, social and technological advances. As generally observed, Developed countries are creator of the intellectual property and developing countries are absorbers.
Pharmaceutical companies, institutes and government labs will help in this technology transfer to share the knowledge and methods to produce suitable rational, geographical and environment friendly products.
Technology transfer is basically defined by WIPO as
‘process by which a developer of technology makes its technology available to commercial partner that will exploit the technology’.
Technology transfer is an important factor to increase benefits to developing countries, in which researches are carried out on experimental scale in the government labs, pharma industries and institutions before its commercialization. Pharmaceutical industry is constantly looking for reducing cost of drug discovery and development. Technology transfer will give the opportunity to reduce the cost.
Technology transfer could happen by following ways like
> Government labs to pharma companies;
> Between pharma companies of the same country;
> Between pharma companies of different countries;
> From institutes to pharma companies
> Collaboration between pharma companies, government labs and institutes.
Generally, pharmaceutical industries have long tedious manufacturing processes which are well developed in technology involving high risk but earn huge profits. But sometimes many of the small pharmaceutical companies do not have such capacities to synthesize the newer therapeutically safe and effective molecule and hence transfer their technologies to the major pharmaceutical companies which have sufficient manpower and financial capacities.
Indian Patent Act 1970 prevented transfer of technology from developed countries to India; which helped Indian companies to make their own technology for Indian market. And thus, Indian pharmaceutical companies now also can stand alongside developed countries. So multinational companies are being attracted by the potential of Indian market and are making collaboration with the Indian Pharmaceutical companies. Eli Lilly established collaboration with Ranbaxy in mid 1990 to develop cost effective process for production of Cefaclor. Other examples of this process are Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC), Department of Biotechnology (DBT), National Chemical Laboratory, Pune. DBT has successfully transferred technology of 3 plants of economic interest - Sugarcane, Eucalyptus and Populous to Cadila pharmaceuticals, Ahmedabad.
In those days, when pharmaceutical companies had to spend billions of money and several years of research to introduce a new molecule, by this process they can collaborate with institutes to conduct basic research, which would further be taken up by these industries.
So we can conclude that technology transfer agreements is of lot of promise for developing countries, be it the health of the individual, of the society or of the economy.