Sir

Your Editorial “Wanted: social entrepreneurs” (Nature 434, 941; 2005) rightly points out the positive steps taken by not-for-profit pharmaceutical ventures to find cures for neglected diseases. But your gentle criticism of universities as impediments to these advances does not go far enough.

My experience is with a group known as Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (http://www.essentialmedicine.org), composed primarily of students seeking to hold universities to their avowed public mission in the arena of health-technology policy. We believe that universities' reluctance to engage with non-traditional pharmaceutical partners stems in part from a myopic focus on taking out patents, executing licences and generating revenue. Success in technology transfer should be measured by its impact on human welfare, which requires an emphasis on innovation in neglected diseases and access to public-health goods.

The fact that neglected-disease drug ventures have to search and negotiate for molecules of interest reveals how upside-down the situation is. When patented innovations have not yet been licensed to an external agency for further development, universities should allow other non-profit institutions to use them in research for neglected diseases, as a matter of policy. When innovations have been out-licensed, universities should include an exemption for research on neglected diseases in their licensing agreements. In either case, the university should forgo royalty payments on products sold in developing countries.

These exemptions can be constructed in such a way that they create a ‘dual-market opportunity’: any products developed could require cross-licensing (agreements between the beneficiary of the neglected-disease exemption and the original licencee) for sale in high-income countries, while being sold in poor countries without further licensing or payment of royalties.

Another point is that the criteria for academic promotion reinforce the difficulty of translating basic research into end-products. In addition to publications and grants, universities should consider a candidate's work in finding treatments for neglected diseases. They could reward participation in preclinical development projects, particularly open-source initiatives pooling research resources to speed commercialization, such as Tropical Disease Initiative (http://www.tropicaldisease.org) and Biological Innovation for Open Society (http://www.bios.net).

Of course, we are a long way from having neglected-disease research free of such hurdles. In the meantime, universities should look to their peers who are leading the charge in overturning the status quo. Yale University, the University of Washington, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Nebraska have all struck deals with non-traditional pharmaceutical ventures transferring intellectual-property rights to further neglected-disease research.

One hopes they are out in front of a much broader trend.