It’s easy to tell faculty members that they need to learn more about the business side of the biotech world if they want to commercialize their discoveries effectively. But what specifically should researchers know? One thing that faculty know about now, but less so thirty years ago, was something called fields of use. It’s essentially the question of how you slice up and sell permission to use a discovery. A license can be geographical — permission to use in a specific country, for example — or in a specific medical field, and so on. As chemistry professor and former director of the Center for Biotechnology at Stony Brook Glenn Prestwich explains:
“You could do a lot with a single technology if you license it for different fields of use, because if you license it for all fields of use, somebody gets it but that means that nobody else gets it for all of the other cool things you can do with it.” Licensing for limited and specific fields of use means that many different companies and people have the opportunity to develop aspects of your discovery that interest them.