 From Munich, my friend, Anja, Siemermann. Hi, Anja. Can you hear us? Yeah, you can probably hear us, but we don't hear you. Okay. Okay. Now it works. Hi. Ah, now it works. Hi. How are you? Good. Good. How are you? Anja is a tech transfer professional with Asinion. Asinion is formally a private company that manages intellectual property for a number of research institutions in Germany. And Anja particularly is the person in charge for equity management. So she deals with startups and spin-off, negotiating for equity position, managing the portfolio of startups, and then discussing exits and all these funding activities that typically venture capital do, but she does it internally for Asinion. Anja will talk about the journey from research to patent. Anja herself is a scientist, by the way, by education, even if she holds an MBA. And of course she is exposed to business and management every day, but by education is a technical person. So Anja, without further ado, we leave the floor to you for your contribution. Thank you for being here today somehow. So thank you for the kind introduction, and thank you for inviting me to give a talk. I'd rather be here with you, I admit, but unfortunately not this time. So yeah, as Masi already said, I am supposed to say something about how to get from research to patent. Now I'm just connecting the clicker. It does work. So yeah, I was asked to say a little bit about the company I'm working for to hopefully to explain why I hope to be capable of giving this talk is all it at all. Then a short introduction to what is IP actually, and then how to get from an invention to a patent. And I would like to finish if there is still time with a few success stories. Okay, so let's start. The company I'm working for, Asinian, is in operation since 2001. And it was initiated by public institutions, and we are ISO 9101 certified. Now our goal is actually to bring research into application, which also can be seen in our mission. Our official mission is advancing technology into application. And of course that goes together with securing our partner institutes IP, which I will mainly talk about today, but also realizing financial returns, actually making money out of this research. And the money we make in the end goes back to the partner institutes and goes back to research. At a glance, currently working for 26 life science institutes, not only in Germany, but also in Austria and some other countries, European countries. During the time we're in operation, so more than 20 years, there were 18 products brought to market, 32 products under development, and everyone of you who works in the life science field, which we are already working in, knows that there's bringing a product therapeutic, a diagnostic or a METEC product into market is both costly and time consuming. So we're quite happy about that. And we had or have equity in 58 companies. And that results in the end in more than 110 million in revenues for research or returns for research. That's us. We all almost all have a background in biology or other natural science. We have some lawyers as you, well, you cannot get by without lawyers these days, so you need a few of them. We are 30 people and yeah, we have seven locations in Germany. You can see them. That's the big red dots and the small red dots, although much bigger than us. That is our clients, which in the end is more than 5,000 scientists. And all these scientists, they do incredible work and they have very, very good ideas. Here we are, how to get from research to a patent. So the question is what is IP? As I just mentioned, all these scientists, they have brilliant ideas. And of course, the question always is what to do with these ideas or creations of mind and intellect IP or intellectual property actually is a legal concept. It means that exclusive rights are recognized for set creations of mind. And wherever there's a legal concept, there of course is also law that makes sure that the creators or the owners of this IP are given exclusive rights and these exclusive rights, they come in different types, which I will discuss a bit more in depth later. For us in tech transfer, patents and trademarks are by far the most important IP rights. So now, if you are an inventor, very often you have an interest to keep the invention secret with academic researchers, of course, that's different as you want to publish. However, quite often, especially if you want to make money from it, you want to maintain your invention secret. The interest of the public, however, is completely opposite. You want to have new technologies, new ideas, new concepts available for the public that other people can pick up those ideas and maybe develop them even further or broaden their knowledge. So what is the solution to that? The solution is a patent in the end. It is a time-limited exclusivity for the inventor. But in exchange for that time-limited exclusivity, you have to disclose your invention to the public. Having said that, I would like to talk about a few ways to protect your IP. One is, of course, trade secrets. The most famous one, probably, the recipe for Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola, the company, they managed to keep this trade secret, actually secret for decades. So it might be a way to go forward, but not for an academic researcher, of course. And even if you have a company or plan to form a company, you have to be careful as somebody might tell the secret and then it's lost. Or, what's even worse, a third party files a patent which might cover your invention and then you, as the inventor, are not even allowed to use it anymore. Then there are copyrights. I think everyone knows about copyrights. They offer very strong protection and they give protection for works of the mind, so to say, for books, for music, for art, but also for scientific publications or computer programs. But this is a protection right where you have to do nothing to gain it. It's just your natural right, so to say. So after trade secrets and copyrights, the question might arise, what actually is the right kind of rights for work technologies? As I said before, we are primarily dealing with patterns on a small, very small scale with utility models of variety protection, but in our day-to-day work that doesn't play a role. There are some un-technical protective rights which we have to deal with. Sometimes that's trademarks. Some of our clients filed a few trademarks, but it's only two or three over all those years. And then designs and copyright. Copyright being more important for software rights. How do you actually get there? How do you get a patent when you have an idea? So as a researcher, if you have a novel idea, created some new material, for example, a new knockout mouse, an antibody. You have new data or discovered a new method. Is it actually an invention? So what we first ask our researchers to do, well, our researchers, yeah, any and they are, we ask them to check the state of the art and then find out is this idea actually new or is it already out there somewhere? And then to ask themselves the data obtained or the idea, is it actually surprising or was it obvious? And then the next question is, could the idea data be used commercially? So that's the first check, which actually I will talk about a bit more later because that's also the requirements for obtaining a patent. And then the next question is, which kind of invention is addressed? Are third parties involved? That's always, or that might be a problem. If there are third parties involved, there always comes the question of ownership who actually owns the patent. And if the scientists, they thought about all these ideas, an invention disclosure should be filed. How that works would require another talk probably with all that stuff about employees, inventions, et cetera, et cetera. So I will not discuss that further a lot. So as I said, once this is done, we think about should a patent actually be filed because it's a lot of work and it costs quite a lot. So technical and economical requirements should be fulfilled first of all. Is the idea, the novel idea patentable? That means is that a chance to get a patent granted, which I will describe in a few minutes. And then what is as important, is it actually patent worthy? That means you might get a patent, but if you cannot make money out of this patent, so why would you actually file one? So is there a market potential? Is there any route to commercial exploitation? Is there any way in the end you might make money from the patent? So that's the two questions actually to be answered. Now to the first one, is the invention patentable? The requirements to obtain a patent, its novelty, inventive step and commercial applicability. Novelty, it's quite easy. It has to be absolutely new, meaning before the day of filing the patent application, the invention cannot be disclosed, nowhere, neither written nor oral, nor as a public use, et cetera, et cetera. And neither by the inventor nor by anyone else. This is crucial for patentability and we always try to educate our scientists to be very, very, very careful with that, meaning no discussions with outsiders, so to say, no talks at conferences, being very careful when submitting a paper because sometimes there is an e-publication before, et cetera, et cetera. So that's really crucial. Next thing is the inventive step, which means that the invention has to be beyond the state of the art. That means when combining the information that's already out there, your invention cannot be obvious. And the question we ask our scientists very often is the solution you had, was it expected, was it part of a standard development, are the results surprising? So that is inventive step and the last requirement is commercial applicability. So that's the possibility to actually use and in the end sell your invention. That's an easy one. When you look what patterns, what kind of patterns were granted, you probably would be surprised to see what kind of inventions were thought to be commercial applicable. There is one, I remember, that's actually a machine which claimed to use, to want to use the centrifugal force with women giving birth to actually get the baby out. So that was a very, very strange, grounded U.S. patent. And if examiners thought there's a commercial applicability for that, then there's commercial applicability for more or less everything. So, and the next, is it worth to patent the invention? What we do is we assess the technology. We try to find out if it would be able to complement technologies, if it is better than non-technologies, if it might contribute to existing portfolios. We try to find out if there is a market and we also try to estimate the expected patenting cost versus potential revenues. To give you an example, you can patent monoclonal antibodies as research tools, not as diagnostics or drugs, that's another story. But as research tools, you can patent them. However, the money you're going to make with them normally is not more than the patenting cost. So we just don't patent them and license them anyhow. So that I think is also quite an important aspect to consider. Okay. So next, when is an invention that's closed? As I said before, novelty is crucial. So all the communications I am listing in this slide, they destroy novelty. That means there shouldn't be any of them before you file a patent. That's something we always discuss with our researchers. We always ask them to file the patent first and publish later, because once it's published, the possibility to get a patent is reduced to zero, unfortunately. And we lost quite a few, not too many unfortunately, but quite a few interesting technologies to that. Now, what actually can be protected by a patent? Actually, anything technical, so to say, that can be compounds or compositions, also uses production processes, procedures and methods, even modified or a lot more, which you can see in this slide. There are also things that actually cannot be protected by a patent, which are scientific theories or discoveries. If NASA discovers a new planet, they cannot patent it. Plants and blueprints, also the human body or parts thereof, and other than in the US clinical therapies. The reason for that is that you don't want a lawyer entering the operating room and be able to stop a procedure. And then, of course, inventions which offend the order of public or are immoral or against the law. If I'd start on the human stem cells debate, we probably wouldn't be finished for another few hours. Now, who owns the right to an invention? I was told that today's audience consists of quite a few researchers. So as a basic principle, of course, the inventor that's you owns the invention. But if you are an employee, you have to disclose the invention to your employer and then the employer will decide or it will be decided whether it is a service invention and then the employer has the right to gain the invention and to retain ownership. And if it's no service invention, then it's free and you're free to do with it what you want. However, just because you always have to disclose your invention to your employer. And once that is established, once all of that is established, who is the owner? Is it patentable? Is the invention patentable? Is the invention patent worthy? You start with a patent application. What we do quite often is we start with a national application. For us, it's mostly German. For you, it might be Italian, probably is Italian. That's relatively cheap. And at least in Germany, I don't know about the Italian patent office. You get a first office action. You get some reply from the examiners within 10 months. And you also can go with a regional application. What we also do quite often, we do a European application. That's one application for 31 contracting states, which is quite nice. And there you get also some preliminary report from the examiners before the first 12 months are over. And then there, of course, is the international patent application. It's called PCT application. That's an option to file a patent or a patent application in a lot of states, as you can see. And the procedure is quite similar. You also get a search and opinion and an examination. And then it will be decided if the patent is granted or not. And there may or may not be opposition proceedings, meaning someone is opposing your patent. With the EP, what we do mostly because the examiners in the European are quite good in the life science field. So you get a search report. That means an opinion, whether your patent is novel, inventive and commercially applicable. And once that is done, the examination starts. That goes back and forth between the patent office and the patent attorney, patent lawyer. And once it's finished, the patent is either a grant or a revocation, meaning you have the patent or you don't. And after grant, as I said, there might or might not be opposition proceedings and the national phase start in some countries, meaning after the European patent is granted, you have to decide in which of those states you actually want a patent and have to go from there. That's kind of the timeline you can see here. You start with a priority application. You get a search report. After a year, you start the international application. 18 months after your priority application, your patent application is published. In the meantime, you receive an international search report and a preliminary report of patentability. And then you decide about the states which actually you want to patent in. The little maps below, you can see all the countries that are in the PCT world, so to say. And in green on the right, you can see who is a partner in the European Patent Convention. Well, is there a time limit for patent protection? Yes, it is. It is 20 years. So once your patent is granted, you have 20 years of protection starting from the first application or priority application in the European. Well, in the European Union, in the European area, there is a possibility of getting five years extra under certain circumstances. And also in the US, you have ways to protect, especially drugs, for a longer time. You have to pay your patent attorney. You have to pay fees to the patent office. You have to pay for translation. You have to pay for maintenance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I listed the costs in the slide. And as you can see, if you have a patent and you want it granted or have that patent in quite a few countries, this easily over the lifetime of the patent goes up to a 60-digit range in euros. So this is really a lot. So that means before you patent, you should have that in mind and actually decide whether it's possible to get this money back plus something extra for profit. So what we do as a researcher, if you want to get an idea whether your idea is already patented or not, you can do a patent search. There are quite a few free databases you can use. There's also Google Patents, of course, which is getting better and better every day. So that also might be something you want to try out. I think I already talked a little bit about that to patent or not to patent. This is the question about the market and the value. However, also the ultimate purpose of patenting should be commercializing. We are very aware of the fact that patents might also be important for, let's say, strategical issues. So national bodies might require research institutes to have a certain number of patents to continue funding for an inventor, for a researcher. It might also be important to have patents in their CV, so to say. So that's also important reasons to keep a patent. However, as I said, the ultimate purpose of patenting should be commercialization. The common tools are either collaboration, joint development, licensing or sale, or building a spin-off. I took a look at the program, so I'm pretty sure there are talks about all these topics, collaboration, licensing, spin-off, so I won't go into that. And I just want to mention there are a lot of technologies actually and well-known ones that were developed at governmently funded research organizations. These are examples from the U.S. and Europe. Epothelone is a drug against cancer. A lot of antibiotics, for example, were developed in research organizations. Cisplatine, another anti-cancer drug. Ibuprofen, I think probably everyone in the audience took a few of those during their lifetime. Then, very importantly, of course, recombinant DNA technologies and genetic engineering of animals and plants. CRISPR-Cas is a current example. There are others, of course, as well. MP3, actually everyone with a smartphone knows MP3. That was developed at the Fraunhofer Institute here in Germany, so we're especially proud of that, of course. MRI, cardiac catheters, and even the HooverCraft. I hope highlights securing IP actually is to make sure that it can be developed further and actual products come out of it. Here is even more. There are some drugs which sell very, very well. These were all developed in the U.S., some of them from very well-known institutions, Memorial Sloan, Catering, New York University, et cetera, et cetera. Actually, it is like 50% more than half of innovative new drugs actually aren't developed in pharma companies themselves, but they start in SMEs or academia. I think that's the last line. That's actually a few of our products which were developed in departments of research institutions we are working for and were brought to market while we were working on it. There are a few therapeutics. Quite some are currently in the clinical pipeline, which for those we are very hopeful. There are quite a few diagnostics, medical technology, and on the back, which you see here, that's actually if you go to mostly Asia, you might find our bitter blocker in some soft drinks you can buy over there. Then, of course, I'm mostly dealing with the spin-offs. There are quite a few successful spin-offs. Heborogenics, one of them, that deals with liver failure, cardiopharmaceuticals, who had a financing round last summer, over 60 million. T-knife, which had a financing round of over 110 million also last year. We're keeping our fingers crossed for their products. They haven't reached the market yet. However, they're all in clinical trials. I hope that with this talk and I am on time, as we still have some minutes remaining for questions. With this talk, I hope I was able to give you an idea why we think that it is very important to secure IP, that it is very important to always have the possibility of finding a patent in mind. With that, thank you very much. If you have questions, just go ahead. Thank you very much, Ania. I'm Riccardo Pietrabisa. Unfortunately, I can't hear you. You can't hear me? Can you hear me? Non sente. So I still can't hear you? Now I can hear you perfectly. Thank you, Ania. I'm Riccardo Pietrabisa. I substitute to Mac Massimiliano, that lived five minutes ago anyway. Thank you very much for your presentation. I greatly appreciate your capability to synthesize all the key points related to IP, particularly for translating research into ownership of invention. So this is a very important key point. So I ask firstly if there is a question from the floor here. Otherwise, we have received a couple of questions from the audience online, particularly both from three now. Two from Roberto Gramignoli. The first referred to the fee, to the payment for patent, because he said that patents would be sponsored. If sponsors and inventors are different entities, who owns the right of commercialization? The second from the same person is can you comment about Professor Privilege's rules in Italy and Germany? Because you know that in the past in Germany too, there was Professor Privilege, now there is no more, while in Italy we established Professor Privilege in 2001 and now is still active. So these first two questions. The first question regarding payment. The right of commercialization depending on the ownership, when something is paid by sponsor. Exactly. So first of all you have to establish who owns the patent. So if the research institution, let's say, owns the patent, they have the right to commercialization, regardless of who actually pays the fees. But I assume that any sponsor wouldn't pay anything if they hadn't secured the rights. So there is probably always a contract in place where this is addressed. So what we see for example, if we do a licensing agreement or a collaboration agreement, we always try to have the company pay for the patent fees. However, the ownership should always remain with the research institution. So this is what we try. The second question regarding Professor's Privilege, I remember very well, it was February 7th, 2002, where in Germany the Professor's Privilege fell. And there was a huge uproar. I think I prefer not to have the Professor's Privilege. Because of a number of reasons, first of all, the Professor only is able to perform his research because he is situated somewhere in a research organization. So that means the research organization also should profit from the research because it was funded by taxpayers' money. So any money that comes back from the invention should also, I think, again benefit the public. Of course, I mean, in Germany, if you are a Professor, the inventors always get 30% of everything that comes in. Don't get me wrong. So if there is a commercial success, that will also be a commercial success for all the inventors. That's the first thing. And the second thing is that I think with us as a professional technology transfer organization, we just make better deals. We had in the past an extraordinary collaboration with a company where his IP would go into the company. And that wasn't possible because the Professor's Privilege fell. And he wanted to give away his IP for payment for one PhD and 50,000 in lab equipment, you know, consumables. And we managed to make a deal where that was more than 20 times the return. Okay, thank you very much, Anya. Indeed, the third question was also related to Professor Privilege in Germany, but we already answered to this question. If there are no more questions, I'd like to point out briefly a problem that Anya said before about publication, scientific publication and patent, which is a problem of time relationship, which is first. But in particular for researchers who are not aware about IP regulations, it's very important to define exactly which is the difference between the two. Because also the patent is a publication, indeed. You can download all this publication, read it and learn with patents. But which is the difference between scientific publication on a peer-reviewed journal or a patent? I want to think at three major points. The first, scientific publication is based on scientific rigor, originality and significance for the community. While patent is based only on novelty and inventive step. So it's completely different the way to admit for publication the first or the second point. Second point, the publication enables the community to learn a lot about some new knowledge. The patent objective is to prevent other to use. So it's not written to explain, but to prevent what should be used by others. And the difference is that while the first is knowledge, the second is invention. And invention is how to use some knowledge to solve a problem. That's not necessary, it's required in any scientific publication. Publication is not to solve a problem, it's to communicate knowledge. So these two differences are completely a completely different role to the tool and the role of research in the tool. So it's very important for researchers to understood that writing a patent is completely different as writing a paper. It's not the same thing. For the different mission, the different goal and the different also time for that. So be aware that to write a good patent you need people aware of writing a patent, write a scientific paper, you need other kinds of skills. So this is very much more... I couldn't agree more, yeah? Because very often researchers we are not aware of what we think differently as we know about how to write and what to write in, in scientific or in IP paper, let me say. So I invite all of you to begin to read patent to understand the difference between scientific publication and IP publication. So, yes, there is a question from the floor. Yes, please. So my question is the following. Understand that when you have a product it was developed in an academic setting which required a whole lab, a whole investment. It makes sense to share the profits. But are the rules the same like when you produce a product that is just essentially coming out from your head and a computer? So like is quantitative work that can be patented subject to the same rules of other types of works that required a lab or some much more initial investment? Is it still the same rules? It's the same. Okay, you have two more very, very brief because we are late. The first from Fabian Baumark Gardner. They ask if in your experience, Anja, do you advise to keep early licenses on IP non-exclusive? That very much depends on the technology. When you have something that might end up as a drug you only can go with exclusive because no pharma company would do that. Would invest all that money that's required for preclinical stuff, clinical phases, et cetera, et cetera. That's millions and millions. So they wouldn't go for an exclusive license. There are other examples. For example, research material. We only license that non-exclusively. So I think it's not so much regarding the phase that the technology is in early or late. In the end, it depends on the later product. What you also can think of, however, is fee licenses. That you give an inclusive license but only for a certain field of application. When you have a technology at hand that might be applicable in different fields. Thank you very much. The very last one from Giovanna Campogiani. This is a very technical question. They say, maybe I'm going off on a topic, but do you think that the unitary patent court will impact patenting in Europe for research organizations? I want to explain at present, patents are active in just one country. So if you want to have a patent valid in different countries, you need more than one patent. Now there is a new regulation that enables to have a European patent that should be defended by a unitary patent court in Europe. The two systems will live together. But this will change probably the strategy. I mean, what we hope is, and that remains to be seen, what we hope is that it makes the unitary patent makes things easier and cheaper. If that is actually the case, I think it will make things easier for research organizations as they just do not have the massive amount of money to find and maintain patents as companies have. The patent budgets in research organizations quite often are much lower. Well, thank you very much.