At the end of each year, many of us become preoccupied for a while with countdowns and top 10 listings. We like to hear what the pundits list as significant and feel like geniuses when we guess what’s on a list.
In the spirit of the season, we’ve put together a list of five items that are critical to consider at the term sheet stage of negotiating an R&D partnership. In our experience, these items are not always adequately addressed, if at all, in an ultimate agreement. Why? They involve patents, and business people and nonpatent lawyers typically don’t like or understand patent issues.
Our perspective and experience comes from negotiating drug and medical device development agreements, where strong patents that cover resulting products are critical for thwarting generic competition and recouping the always-substantial R&D investment. However, patent issues are no less important for R&D collaborations directed to other technologies and products.