NIH has just launched the “Electronic Research Materials” (eRMa) catalogue to streamline the agency’s technology transfer process. The new eRMa web site should reduce response time for unpatented materials from six months to a few days and can be found at www.ott.nih.gov/erma. eRMa was designed and developed by NIH’s Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) with support from the NIH National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Research.
More than 6,000 researchers at NIH laboratories help to drive the research and discovery process. These NIH researchers make unpatented materials available to companies through internal use licenses executed by OTT. An NIH internal use license is a contract that governs the transfer of tangible research materials from NIH to a company for commercial research use.
The new system will streamline the licensing process by:
• Providing a website for companies to find and license unpatented materials using a ready-to-go contract
• Allowing a company to pay online through www.pay.gov and to receive the materials quickly from the labs
• Providing faster turn-around time and simplifying the process for companies to find research materials available from NIH labs
For non-profit research organizations interested in obtaining NIH materials through a material transfer agreement, NIH will launch the “Transfer Agreement Dashboard” in December. This web-based system will have a broad array of beneficiaries to include NIH scientists and technology transfer staff as well as researchers and technology transfer offices at universities and non-profit research institutions.
The NIH Office of Technology Transfer administers about $97 million annually in royalty payments from about 500 companies that have reported product sales of about $6 billion last year. OTT manages the patenting and licensing of the wide range of inventions made by NIH and FDA scientists as mandated by legislation.
For more information, go to the Office of Technology Transfer web site at www.ott.nih.gov.
