TAXPAYER’S INVESTMENT IN HARVARD
A Snapshot On A Slice of The Return on Investment at America’s Oldest University
Harvard, America’s oldest and most controversial university at the moment, is having a rough week. The week started with a message from the Office of the President at Harvard:
"Over the course of the past week, the federal government has taken several actions following Harvard’s refusal to comply with its illegal demands. Although some members of the administration have said their April 11 letter was sent by mistake, other statements and their actions suggest otherwise. Doubling down on the letter’s sweeping and intrusive demands—which would impose unprecedented and improper control over the University—the government has, in addition to the initial freeze of $2.2 billion in funding, considered taking steps to freeze an additional $1 billion in grants, initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. These actions have stark real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world. "
The lawyers have been called, the Rolaids have been secured, the donors are alarmed, and the R&D enterprise has been disrupted.
Big Numbers Don’t Explain The Complexity of the Situation
Freezing over $3 billion in federal funding is a big number. It doesn’t explain the impact on the federal innovation ecosphere and America’s scientists and researchers.
The Harvard R&D complex is a vast enterprise that competes for and wins grants and contracts with the federal government to help solve some of the country’s most challenging and important scientific and technical issues. There are many ways to measure the return on the taxpayer’s investment in Harvard's R&D. FedInvent looks at patents and the all-important US intellectual property they represent.
A 2021-2024 Snapshot
Today, FedInvent presents a snapshot of the return on the taxpayer’s investment in grants and contracts awarded to Harvard over a short, recent period of time. This newsletter examines the patents Harvard and its affiliates received in just the last four years, 2021-2024.
The Harvard R&D Complex
The data presented here includes patents assigned to Harvard College and to any of its medical school affiliates. Harvard College and its affiliates jointly own many of the patents.
Between 2021 and 2024, Harvard and its Harvard Medical School affiliates received 1,307 patents from the USPTO. These patents contain 2,621 citations to grants or contracts awarded to Harvard and its affiliates. The patents awarded from 2021-2024 include one or more of these Harvard entities as an assignee:
There is a high level of collaboration between Harvard College and its medical school affiliates. Only 662 patents have a single Harvard entity as an assignee.
Fifteen of the Harvard patents are intramural research, where federal employees and researchers from Harvard and its affiliates worked on inventions together.
In addition to the Harvard Medical School affiliates, 168 patents have the Broad Institute as an assignee. The Broad Institute is a research collaboration between the academic and medical communities at both Harvard and MIT. One hundred twenty-two of these patents include Harvard College or one of its affiliates as an assignee.
The Technology
The 1,307 patents were disproportionately focused on inventions in Biotechnology and Organic Chemistry, the Technology Center, where medically focused patent applications are examined. Patents examined in other Technology Centers also lean medical. The inventions include biodefense technology, medical devices, diagnostic imaging, machine learning for medical imaging, on-a-chip and microfluidic inventions, materials, and sensors. There are 15 quantum computing patents.
Here is how Harvard’s patents break down by the Technology Center at the USPTO that examined the patents.
Three additional patents were examined in Technology Center 3900, the Central Reexamination Unit at USPTO.
The Departments that Funded the Harvard Patents
The table below presents the departments cited by inventors as a funding source on the Harvard patents.
Health and Human Services, But Mostly NIH
The Department of Health and Human Services is cited as a funding source on 1,391 patents. Only six (6) of these patents do NOT cite NIH grants. Four were funded by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Two were funded by BARDA, the Center for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. BARDA promotes the advanced development of medical countermeasures to protect Americans and respond to 21st-century health security threats. The National Institutes of Health is cited as an R&D funding source on the other 1,385 patents.
National Institutes of Health
NIH PATENTS BY INSTITUTE— FedInvent found 1,307 taxpayer-funded patents granted to Harvard or Harvard Medical School affiliates from 2021 through 2024. The 1,307 patents cite 1,452 individual grants or contracts issued by the National Institutes of Health as the source of funding for the R&D that led to the patent. This table presents the number of patents where an inventor cited an NIH institute as a funding source, or where an inventor who is an employee of an institute appears on the patent.
Highlights from Other Departments
While NIH is the major source of funding for the Harvard patents, Harvard engaged in research for other federal departments and agencies. Here are some highlights.
Biodefense and Synthetic Biology - DARPA
The 260 DOD patents included 107 funded by DARPA, including 18 funded by DARPA’s ADEPT program. The Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics (ADEPT) program supports individual troop readiness and total force health protection by developing technologies to rapidly identify and respond to threats posed by natural and engineered diseases and toxins. Fifty-two of these patents cite grants from either DARPA’s Safe Genes Program or Living Foundries Program or both. The Safe Genes program supports force protection and military health and readiness by protecting Service members from accidental or intentional misuse of genome editing technologies. The program sought to leverage advances in gene editing technology to expedite the development of advanced prophylactic and therapeutic treatments against gene editors. DARPA Dialysis-Like Therapeutics (DLT) program appears as a funding source on 15 patents. DARPA envisioned a system that would be capable of removing at least 90% of unknown pathogens, cytokines, toxins, and activated cells from a patient in one day to significantly reduce patient mortality.
The Military Health Complex - USAMRMC
The United States Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC) advances research, development, and acquisition of medical products and technologies to support our Armed Forces worldwide. Seven hundred thirty-six (736) patents awarded to Harvard cite funding from a grant from USAMRMC and the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program. Sixteen (16) patents are intramural patents where one or more of the inventors is a federal employee. Three hundred twenty-four (324), 44% of the 736 patents that have at least one USAMRMC grant citation also cite funding from one or more NIH institute.
Space Medicine - DOD and NASA
Three patents were funded by NASA’s National Space Biomedical Research Institute and the United States Army Medical Research and Development Command. The National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) was a NASA-funded consortium of institutions studying the health risks of long-duration spaceflight and developing solutions to reduce those risks.
Post-Genomic Research - DOE
DOE’s "Genomes to Life” program plans to take advantage of solutions that nature has already devised to help solve problems in energy production, environmental cleanup, and carbon cycling. Through a systems approach to biology at the interface of the biological, physical, and computational sciences, the program seeks to understand entire living organisms and their interactions with the environment. In 2002, Harvard Medical School received one of the grants under this program. The program is called, “MICROBIAL ECOLOGY, PROTEOGENOMICS AND COMPUTATIONAL OPTIMA.” George Church, Harvard’s prolific genome researcher, is the Principal Investigator. From 2021-2024, Harvard and its affiliates received 18 patents funded by this program. This single grant to Harvard has resulted in a total of 48 patents to date. The project is currently funded through 2026, unless DOGE kills it first.
The Collaborations
Scientific dispersion is one method of accelerating the discovery, invention, and commercialization of new products. In short, scientific dispersion is spreading scientific know-how. Geographically dispersed collaboration on R&D efforts is an important element in scientific dispersion. Collaboration on patents ups the game because it moves scientific dispersion closer to the marketplace. Researchers receive patents with the goal of creating products and generating revenue.
Harvard’s R&D Complex supports collaborations with other research organizations around the world. FedInvent used the presence of third-party assignees on the Harvard patents as an indication of collaborations. The majority of Harvard’s collaborations were with other universities and international R&D institutes based on the presence of assignees on patents that also cite Harvard or its affiliates. The patents assigned to Harvard from 2021-2024 reflect collaborations with 42 US universities and 19 foreign universities and research institutes.
Harvard’s US Collaborations
The list that follows includes the universities that collaborated with Harvard researchers and the number of patents that cite the collaborating entity.
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY — 2
BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE — 2
BOSTON UNIVERSITY — 12
BROWN UNIVERSITY — 7
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY — 4
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY — 1
DUKE UNIVERSITY — 3
EMORY UNIVERSITY — 4
FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY — 1
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY — 1
GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY — 2
GEORGIA TECH — 1
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY — 1
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY — 149
MAYO FOUNDATION — 1
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY — 1
NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY — 7
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY — 1
OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY — 3
OREGON HEALTH AND SCIENCE UNIVERSITY — 1
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY — 1
RUTGERS, THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY —4
STANFORD UNIVERSITY — 5
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY — 2
TUFTS UNIVERSITY — 3
UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA AT BIRMINGHAM — 1
UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA — 1
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA — 7
UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI — 1
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA — 1
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK — 1
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS — 5
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN — 1
UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA — 1
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA — 1
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA — 1
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH — 2
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA — 1
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS — 2
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA — 1
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY — 1
WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY — 2
Harvard’s Foreign Collaborators
The Harvard patents cite collaborations with researchers affiliated with 15 countries.
The list of foreign collaborators doesn’t reflect foreign pharmaceutical companies or governments. One of the collaborations was with the MINISTRY OF FISHERIES AND MARINE RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT, a government agency of the Republic of Kiribati, an island country in the Micronesia subregion of Oceania in the central Pacific Ocean. Kiribati was a recipient of funding from USAID. Not anymore, thanks to DOGE.
A Complex Harvard R&D Complex
Simply stating that Harvard lost over $3 billion in federal funding doesn’t convey the impact on global R&D and scientific endeavors. The implication that the problem can be solved by cracking open the endowment accounts to fund the work is a simply solution for an extremely complex situation.
The snapshot of the patents Harvard received from 2021-2024, who funded the R&D, and with whom Harvard’s researchers collaborated, is a look at a very small slice of the importance of Harvard’s R&D complex and the network of entities that support it. We suspect we’ll see a similar network if we look at the patents from Columbia, Northwestern, or MIT.
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The FedInvent Team
FedInvent tells the stories of inventors, investigators, and innovators. Wayfinder Digital's FedInvent Project follows the federal innovation ecosphere, taxpayer money, and the inventions it pays for. FedInvent is a work in progress. Please reach out if you have questions or suggestions. You can reach us at info@wayfinder.digital.