TOOLS & TIPS

This is a place where members can share practical information with each other – best practices, useful forms or processes, or anything deemed worth sharing. Nothing in this section is vetted by the UIDP itself, and so please use these postings with that in mind. To post something in this area, please email uidp@nas.edu with the item you would like to post and a small paragraph explaining its purpose.

Tool Name and Purpose
Materials Transfer Agreement – Company Drug to University Researcher This document is primarily intended for use in situations where the company is transferring a product with known pharmacological properties (established drug or drug in development) to a university researcher.  It is based on research conducted by Jim Snipes, JD, Managing Partner, and Jeff Wu, JD, Associate, Covington & Burling, San Francisco and commissioned by the Institute of Medicine, Forum on Drug Discovery, Development, and Translation.		MTA (Word Doc)
Applied Sciences and Engineering Solutions Research Program, Penn State University, Sample Agreement This agreement form is primarily applicable to projects in which a university professor is bringing standard scientific or engineering solutions to problems that companies have with already existing or nearly developed technologies or products. Such solutions might involve combining non-IP off-the-shelf applications that have worked to solve parallel problems in other contexts. Solution could also include running company products through specific test-bed or computer simulation models to refine product specifications for the company. In this agreement, all IP rights that solve the companies’ problems are considered part of the deliverables to the company. In all likelihood, however, the probability of IP useful to the university – either as a revenue-generator or as a needed platform for future research – is virtually zero. To determine whether a given company’s need falls in the above category, there is a companion questionnaire for the professor to fill out. The utility was developed by the Penn State University Research Council under the direction of the ad hoc committee chair Dr. John Mason, associate dean of research at The Pennsylvania State University.		ASESR order form (PDF) ASESR documentation (PDF)
Open Collaboration Principles These principles are used when both sides intend for the results to end up in a free and open public commons. Primarily applicable to projects that produce data or software in collaboration with large companies in the software and IT sectors. Developed by Lou Masi and Dawn Tew of IBM.		Open Collaboration (PDF)
Agreement for Testing Services This short agreement covers situations in which a professor is to conduct specialized tests on a company’s product, using know-how developed at the university. Inventions related to improvements to the sponsor’s product are given to the sponsor; inventions related to improvements in the professor/university’s testing procedure and related know-how (anything not specific to the product) belong to the university. This agreement preserves the right of the company to improve its product based on test results but preserves university rights to advance research in the field. The document presented here has been in use for many years at the Pennsylvania State University and was shared with the UIDP by John Hanold.		Memorandum of Agreement (PDF)