Stanford's licensing and equity practices with biotechnology companies

Abstract

Stanford University's Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) has a long history of licensing technologies to biotechnology start-up companies. This paper presents (1) examples of how the OTL works with biotechnology start-ups to negotiate licence agreements for Stanford-owned intellectual property, taking into account a new company's scarce financial resources and needs but their large intellectual property appetite; and (2) an analysis of the rate of success of biotechnology companies emerging from Stanford based on information obtained from the equity records at Stanford's OTL. OTL started taking equity more often in start-up companies in the mid-1990s and generally takes equity as part of most exclusive licences to early-stage companies.