Comments :

------------------------[ Original Message ]--------------------
To              : internet[xxxxxx@mitvma.mit.edu]
Cc              :
From            : xxxxxx@xxxxxx@ULAVAL
Date            : Monday, June 13, 1994  13:10:38 EDT

Dear Techno-L readers,

One of our faculty member is retiring in august. Recently he met, at a
scientific meeting probably, a large pharmaceutical company that has showed
interest in a collection of chemical compounds that he has accumulated over his
30 years with the university. This company is proposing to acquire for a few
thousand dollars (canadian!) the entire collection of some 1500 compounds. The
payment would be final so that no royalties would be negociated if any compound
would be used commercially by the company in the future. The company has no
intention of accepting the changes we have proposed to their agreement and will
be "declining the collection respectfully" if we don't sign their agreement.

We have no patents on any compounds that are the result of fundamental research
by the PI. We had proposed to them that if any of those compounds was of any
commercial interest to them after one year of testing, we would negociate a
license. The collection is mainly composed of quinones and we realize that it
may not have a high potential commercially. But we hate to see all of these
public funded research go to a company for almost nothing! Has any other
institutions encoutered a similar proposal from a company?

By the way, anybody out there interested in acquiring the collection for
research purposes!?!

Thanks in advance for your comments on this one.

Robert Masella
Office of technology transfer
Universite Laval
tel:(418) 656-2692
fax:(418) 656-7785
E-mail: xxxxxx@bvar.ulaval.ca