Hoping to stanch the red ink spewing forth from the double-edge sword of the Bayh-Dole Act, several research universities are looking for better ways to triage the value of their faculty's scientific and technological discoveries.

Professor Tillman Gerngross

Ever since Congress passed Bayh-Dole more than 30 years ago, giving universities the right to patent and license research funded by federal dollars, schools have been setting up tech transfer programs all over the country.

But most of the programs are hemorrhaging money, as they're spending more on patenting and licensing worthless intellectual property (IP) than they're taking in through royalties, Tillman Gerngross, the newly appointed associate provost of Entrepreneurship & Technology Transfer at Dartmouth, told BioWorld Today.

Tired of risking the health of their tech transfer programs, universities need a new prescription for investing in research that has real value to drugmakers and other industries. Dartmouth, for instance, is taking a holistic approach that rewards its researchers and encourages them to turn their innovative ideas into applications that will truly impact people.