Abstract
While South Africa appears to have many of the building blocks in place to support a vibrant biotechnology sector, the potential which exists has not yet been realised. Several policies and programmes have therefore been introduced by government in recent years in order to address some of the barriers. The poor flow of technologies from research laboratories to industry has been identified as an area of particular concern, with the role of institutional technology transfer offices (TTOs) as facilitators of improved technology transfer being highlighted. This paper describes the status quo of biotechnology in South Africa, discusses relevant policy developments and against this background, examines the status of TTOs, the constraints which are faced and how these might be overcome.
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Notes
At the time of writing, the South African rand was equivalent to approximately US$ 6.
The Survey was commissioned by Egolibio Life Sciences Incubator (in conjunction with DST), in an attempt to generate quantitative baseline data for tracking the South African biotechnology sector over time.
In contrast, it is estimated that venture capital investment of US$ 1.1 billion (adjusted for purchasing power parity) had been made in the Indian biotechnology industry by the end of 2003 (Chaturvedi, 2005).
Motari et al. (2004) identified only eight patents issued to South African inventors in the area of health biotechnology by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in the period 1991–2002.
The others are technology for manufacturing, technology to leverage knowledge from and add value to the natural resource sectors and technology for poverty reduction.
In addition to the BRICs, other institutions set up in response to the NBS include the Public Understanding of Biotechnology programme (PUB) and the National Bioinformatics Network (NBN). PUB was launched to promote understanding of the potential of biotechnology, ensure broad public awareness and engage the public in debate. The NBN was created to build South African bioinformatics capacity, especially amongst disadvantaged groups, and to carry out world class bioinformatics research, through a network of nodes based at universities around the country.
Calculated at the prevailing exchange rate at the time of writing, without adjusting for purchasing power parity.
See Sect. 3.5.4.
National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act No 10 of 2004.
The intellectual property legislative framework pre-dates TRIPS and only relatively minor changes were needed to bring South African law into compliance with TRIPS.
Technology transfer functions may be located in offices dealing with other functions too, such as sponsored research, development, contract management or industry liaison, and activities are sometimes dispersed between some of these offices.
A handful of information-gathering exercises attempting an assessment have yielded data of limited value, as clear definitions of requested values were not always given, and were thus not interpreted in the same way by all respondents, so that the information supplied was not always comparable.
E.g., AUTM Annual Survey.
Only 1.3% of active licences and options yielded over one million dollars of income in FY 2002, and royalties earned amounted to less than 3% of total research expenditure (Association of University Technology Managers, 2003).
i.e., Most research according to current norms, although this is changing.
This is estimated at about 28% (CENIS, 2002).
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Wolson, R.A. The role of technology transfer offices in building the South African biotechnology sector: an assessment of policies, practices and impact. J Technol Transfer 32, 343–365 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-006-9027-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-006-9027-6