Patent to Free,
Not to Fence.

Late one evening in September I caught myself asking a question I could not put down: what would BioFund do with its ideas if money were no object?

The answer arrived faster than the question. We would patent nothing. We would publish everything, so that nobody else could enclose it, and invite anyone serious to build on it with us.

We do not have infinite money. But the thought experiment turned out to be useful, because it pulled apart two things that usually travel together: what we believe, and what we can afford. This note is about the distance between them, and how small we intend to keep it.

The email nobody owns.

Imagine that someone had patented email. Every message would carry a license fee, or be forbidden outright. The internet as we know it would never have happened.

It happened because its core was given away. The protocols that carry every message came out of public research. In 1993, CERN released the World Wide Web into the public domain. Anyone could build on it, and everyone did.

There is a quieter half of this story, and it is the half I keep returning to. Openness worked because someone paid for the expensive part first. Public research budgets carried the hard, uncertain years. Only then could the commons take over.

Open innovation is not free. It needs a patron — someone willing to pay for the part nobody can own.

What a patent is really for.

In medicine, a patent is less a reward for invention than a way to finance proof.

An idea is cheap. Proving that it is safe and that it works is enormously expensive. Clinical development can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take a decade or more. No rational investor spends that on a molecule a competitor could copy the day after approval.

So the patent does its job. It turns a fragile idea into an asset that can carry the cost of its own proof. That bargain has delivered real medicines to real patients, and I have no complaint about it.

But it is worth naming plainly. The patent system is, above all, a financing mechanism. And financing mechanisms can be replaced.

The price of the bargain.

Every bargain has a price. This one is paid in ideas that never get tested.

Orphaned ideas. A promising compound that cannot be patented often goes nowhere. Old, off-patent drugs with hints of anticancer activity can sit untested for decades. Nobody can own the result, so nobody pays for the trial.

Silent laboratories. Researchers hold findings back until a filing is secured. Months pass. A colleague on another continent repeats work that was already done.

Fences around the commons. Knowledge that should be shared becomes territory, and collaboration slows to the pace of contracts.

This is nobody's fault. It is simply what the incentive produces. A different incentive would produce something different.

Why we can choose differently.

If a patent exists to finance proof, then a different kind of financing changes the equation.

BioFund is backed by seven founding families. There is no fund to return, no exit to engineer, no quarter to report to. Our research programs run on the long clock we described in Two Clocks: seven-year cycles, three of them, by design.

A venture investor needs a patent to justify waiting. We were built to wait.

The condition that makes patents necessary applies to us far less than to almost anyone else in our field. That is a privilege, and privileges are meant to be used.

Four tools, one question.

Open is our default. Every patent we file has to answer a single question: does it make us, and our partners, more free? In practice, we choose among four tools.

1. 01
   Publish

   Share openly, in journals and preprints, so that nobody can enclose it.

   Our default for discoveries and platform knowledge
2. 02
   Patent and pledge

   Patent, then license freely for research and non-profit use, with improvements shared back.

   When openness alone would invite someone else to fence it
3. 03
   Patent to sell

   Protect an asset so that a partner can carry it to market.

   Rarely, and only to fund our independence
4. 04
   Keep the craft

   Share the results; keep the know-how of producing them, and offer it as a service.

   Cell engineering and methods

The third tool deserves honesty. We will occasionally sell. When a partner is better placed to bring something to patients, a license lets them do it — and the proceeds buy the freedom to keep everything else open. That is the whole logic: we patent a few things so that we never have to patent the rest.

The fourth tool is where our real strength lies. A published result is easy to read. Twenty years of craft behind it is much harder to reproduce. We can give the knowledge away and sustain ourselves by the skill.

Open, with our eyes open.

Publishing prevents others from patenting what we disclosed. It does little to stop them patenting everything around it.

A new formulation, a dosing schedule, a combination, a manufacturing step, a new indication: each can be claimed by someone else. An open core can end up surrounded by other people's fences. Generosity without care can hand the commons to whoever files fastest.

So we hold ourselves to three disciplines.

1. I
   Decide before we speak.

   Disclosure is irreversible. In Europe, a single conference talk or public web page can end the chance to patent. Every result is reviewed for its path before it leaves the lab.
2. II
   Publish the neighborhood, not just the house.

   When we open something, we also disclose the obvious next steps, so that they stay open too.
3. III
   Pledge with teeth.

   When we patent to protect the commons, our licenses require that improvements come back to it.

An invitation to our partners.

We work with universities, and universities have technology transfer offices whose mandate is to protect and license what their researchers create. We respect that mandate.

What we offer our partners is a different default for the work we do together: publish early, license freely for research, and keep the path to patients wide. Where a partner needs protection, we will find a structure that gives it without fencing out the next laboratory. Where a partner shares our view, we will be the funder that lets openness happen.

Most scientists entered the field to understand and to heal, and very few of them to write claims. We would like to give them room to do what they came for.

The consequence.

The internet grew because thousands of people could build on each other's work without asking permission.

Biology is not software, and medicine will always need proof. But the same truth holds at its core: knowledge compounds when it moves. A finding shared in Guelph can inform an experiment in Szeged by the following week. A lesson learned treating a dog can shape how we treat a child.

We will patent when it sets us free. Everything else, we intend to share.

If we are right, the path to preventing and curing cancer gets shorter. Not because we own it, but because nobody does.