My Journey to Open Science: Cell

"Even worse, academic patents tend not only to be useless, but are often perversely used to block the development of competitive products, preventing people from sharing and moving discovery forward. I learned this firsthand when a company discovered an excellent target for the development of a drug to treat an important human disease. Unfortunately, a previous patent with broad applications that included this disease significantly delayed the development of a drug that had the potential to change the lives of countless people. Nearly twenty years later, the drug is only now in clinical trials."