On December 5, 2024, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) submitted comments to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on the “Prospective Grant of Exclusive License, Inter-Institutional Agreement-Institution Lead: Peptides and Peptide Microarrays for Detection and Differentiation of Antibody Responses to Ebola Virus and Other Pathogens” (89 FR 91773) to The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, Columbia Technology Ventures. Columbia Technology Ventures (CTV) is the technology transfer office of Columbia University.
The technology to be licensed relates “to novel peptides that enable specific and sensitive serological detection of adaptive immune responses to a wide range of clinically important high threat pathogens circulating in sub-Saharan Africa on a wide range of platforms. These assays allow identification of individuals who have been immunized and/or infected with filoviruses.”
The patent rights are currently co-owned by Columbia and the NIH and the license is explicitly intended to consolidate the rights with CVT for the purposes of commercialization and marketing. Considering this explicit intent and the likely areas of the world that would benefit from this technology, it is critical that the NIH ensures that any exclusive license contains terms that safeguard affordable and equitable access to any resultant technology.
KEI’s full comments are available here: KEI-Comments-NIH-License-Columbia-5Dec2024