Research grants issued by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) contribute to a significant number of private-sector patents in biomedicine, according to a new study co-authored by an MIT professor.
The study, published in the journal Science, examines 27 years of data and finds that 31 percent of NIH grants, which are publicly funded, produce articles that are later cited by patents in the biomedical sector.
“The impact on the private sector is a lot more important in magnitude than what we might have thought before,” says Pierre Azoulay, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who is one of the authors of the paper.
