Patent or perish

Question from a reader:

I want to make the transition from industry to academia, as you are about to.  I haven't published in five years, how can I supplement my CV?  I'm assuming you were in the same boat as I, and most advice I find online is about making the transition to a professorship from a current academic position (post-doc/grad school).

I can't publish my industry work in journals.  The only data of mine that goes public is in FDA filings, so this isn't always the most novel stuff.  I'm somewhere between second-fifteenth author on a couple major publications and conference abstracts where physicians have put me on their work since it's my device they're using, but I didn't really think these counted.  And any data that I got on my own needs to stay within the company.  If competitors take my data and turn it into a successful product then shareholders will be quite upset.  The only way I've been able to publish my work (and keep my CV fresh) was to turn this novel data into medical devices.  This is where patents come in.

With patents, I come up with an idea based on something crazy I think of in the shower (hot, right?) or when I realize that we can turn our data into a device I write a paragraph and attach a couple pics then upload it to our lawyers.  Our lawyers do a prior art search (I can write about the patent process from my point-of-view if you'd like...) then come back to me with how we should write the patent.  Without going into all the details, eventually this results in a plaque with my name and USPTO number on it.

This is how I bridged my academic publications and my industry work.  You've heard of 'publish or perish', in most high-level medical device jobs it's 'patent or perish'.  We get awards, crazy money, and recognition for patents...even if we just submit it and it never turns into a patent...or just a utility patent.  If you're not patenting (thereby preventing the competition from pursuing your awesome idea) then you're falling behind.  Those in the highest levels of scientific leadership here hold tons of patents.

I don't know if this is actually the best thing to do, and some companies choose trade secrets over patents...in which case I don't know what you'd do (advice from other readers, please?).  But this is how I managed to convince academics that I've done something between grad school and my current position.  I'm not sure if this even mattered.  Maybe the pedigree matters more than any patents or pubs...

My beef with patents

In a lot of biomedical companies, you are judged by the number of patents you hold. So we seek out every type of patent we can. I've been asked to file three patents today that I know will never be worked on by my company because we already have a ton of products in our pipeline. We're taking up the patent in order to prevent our competition from working on it. Or they can work on it, and we'll license the patent to them. But all we're doing is making a couple crappy sketches and filing. No actual R&D work. However, if you file lots of patents you get pats on the back, promotions, and $2000 per patent.

Let's say this product could have saved 100,000 lives. Now it won't, because no one can work on it, and we're not planning on developing it. This is contrary to journal publishing. We can steal, build-upon, and refocus from one another, but ultimately, nothing useful happens with the data...just like with some of these patents (by the way, my legal department says this isn't patent trolling, even though I think it is). So which is worse?

I'd say patents for a few reasons. First, in publications, nothing's happening with it (the time spent on my medical device patents will save more lives in a year than all my publications combined for the rest of the timespan of humankind), but at least you're letting anyone use it, including a company if they want to. A patent is locking up the idea. Second, patents don't contribute anything. They only take away. Patents are often written as broad as possible and very little engineering and science go into them. So no one can learn too much from them. This is on contrast to most manuscripts, where they are filled with all sorts of intellectual awesomeness that other researchers can build on. In addition, most of the claims are substantiated by data.  So someone else could potentially take the broad idea to market and save lives, but they can't without paying crazy license fees for a patent the issued company isn't using.  Patents have data, but it's not as scrutinized as most academic papers.  The change that the USPTO has made where you don't have to prove due-diligence and the patent is awarded to first-to-file is only going to make things worse (I can explain more on the patent cycle and medical device IP if any of you want to read a post on it).

Ultimately, I despise locking up an idea that could save lives if we don't intend on utilizing it. It's a defensive move that only helps shareholders. We could use these defensive patents as offensive weapons against the competition and the diseases. But ultimately, they sit back with their pitch and arrows just preventing anyone else from reaching good.