It’s easy to imagine a straightforward progression from research to commercialization, with the scientific work taking a specific commercial form, and that’s that. But the process of commercialization itself — for example, what type of licensing agreements you choose — can affect the development of further research, nudging the science in a variety of possible directions. Glenn Prestwich, former director of Stony Brook’s Center for Biotechnology, explains how choices made in the early stages of the commercialization of a potential drug can affect what happens later:
Glenn Prestwich, interviewed via Zoom on June 20, 2023
Interviewer: Antoinette Sutto
The dilemma was do we try and find somebody big that will do an exclusive license for a lot of money or do we lot do lots of non-exclusive licenses?
The wisdom, which was so important at the time, was to do lots of non-exclusive licenses because it became a transformational technique across biology, biochemistry, molecular biology, and protein-protein interactions in the late ’80s and early ’90s. No, early ’90s. It was absolutely transformational in drug discovery and everything else to have multiple non-exclusive licenses to this technology.
Interviewer: It sounds like some of the business decisions– You had options as far as like how to organize it in patent terms or business terms and this had an effect on how the science was used and how the technology developed. If you’re licensing it in one way, you get one outcome and had it been licensed in another way, you might have gotten a completely different outcome in terms of what got done later.
Glenn: Absolutely right.