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FDA Technology Transfer Program

Collaborations are Key to Advancing Regulatory Science


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Creating a streamlined, 21st-century Technology Transfer program that helps FDA drive innovation in research and bring products, technologies, and cures to the American people quickly and safely.

Mission

The mission of FDA's Technology Transfer Program, within the Office of the Chief Scientist, is to establish and maintain robust frameworks and tools that FDA relies on to collaborate with all stakeholders, and to promote the use of research outcomes that protect and advance public health. 

Government | Industry | Academia

FDA scientists, together with collaborators in academia, industry and government, develop technologies that support the evaluation, development, manufacture, and use of new tools, standards, and approaches to assess the safety, efficacy, quality, and performance of the products FDA regulates.  

The goal of the Technology Transfer Program is to ensure the full use of the results of FDA’s investment in research and development. 

The program achieves this by engaging in collaborations to develop innovations and by transferring, through collaborations or by licenses, FDA technologies to organizations able to translate FDA’s innovations into new products that protect and advance public health.  

What We Do

FDA’s Technology Transfer Program performs a variety of technology transfer activities to support the development of FDA research.  FDA Technology Transfer staff:

• Establish collaborative research agreements with outside parties that facilitate collaborations between FDA researchers and industry, academics, and nonprofits
• Evaluate employee invention reports and select the most effective mechanism for bringing the technology to the public
• Manage the patenting of new discoveries from FDA laboratories
• License new technologies, biological materials, and animal models that FDA scientists invent
• Manage the establishment of transactional agreements--like Material Transfer Agreements--that transfer materials to academic and non-profit organizations for research use

FDA Technology Portfolio  

FDA's Technology Transfer Program team helps move these technologies to the private sector by patenting and licensing these developments so that new products in areas like vaccines, food pathogen detection systems, counterfeit drug detection, and manufacturing can be created and made available on the market.

In the last few years alone, FDA researchers have produced and reported about 20 patentable inventions annually. And FDA holds over 600 invention properties that represent over 100 unique technologies of which about 15% are licensed for development.  

In working to meet the missions of FDA product centers and offices, FDA scientists have discovered and developed a broad range of technologies.  To view FDA technologies that are available for licensing visit the FDA Licensing Opportunities web page or the Available Technologies Search Tool  at the Federal Laboratory Consortium.  

You may also refer to the listing of Recently Issued U.S. Patents to FDA web page.

For more information, please contact Alice Welch, Director of FDA’s Technology Transfer Program.
 

Technology Transfer Blogs

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