From 2021 to 2025, Connecticut universities, hospitals and companies have netted $117.6 million in licensing revenue from products created using federally funded research, per a new report released by the Bayh-Dole Coalition, an advocacy group formed in 2021 to promote the federal Act of the same name.
“For over four decades, the Bayh-Dole Act has helped ensure federally funded research does not end with scientific discovery, but continues through commercialization to create products, companies, jobs, and industries that benefit the American public,” reads the report. “The law helped make the United States a worldwide leader in innovation, not through government micromanagement, but by enabling the institutions behind inventions benefiting from government-funded research to manage them effectively.”
Named after its co-sponsors, U.S. Senators Birch Bayh (D-IN) and Bob Dole (R-KA), the Act was passed in 1980, allowing academic institutions, hospitals, small companies, and federal laboratories to own the patent rights to inventions derived from federally funded research. Previously, such patents belonged to the federal government, a situation that the U.S. General Accounting Office determined led to only 5% of these patents actually being commercialized. The Coalition credits the bill for creating $3.3 trillion in gross economic output and $1.7 trillion in GDP from 1996 to 2025, and for generating hundreds of thousands of new patents and tens of thousands of new products.
Critics have argued that patenting potentially life-saving discoveries leads to higher costs and restricted patient access, while supporters point out that the ability to protect their intellectual property is what leads people to invest their time in a new product’s creation. In either case, federally funded research has been stymied by the Trump administration’s freeze on federal research grants. In August 2025, Howard Lutnick, U.S. Secretary of Commerce, announced an “immediate comprehensive review” of Harvard’s compliance with the Act, a move that university spokespeople have criticized as an act of undue scrutiny to retaliate against Harvard’s resistance to Trump’s education mandates.
The report notes that the Northeast has been the biggest beneficiary of the Act, likely because it is home to all eight of the nation’s Ivy League schools, renowned for their histories as private research hubs. Per the report, federal grants to Northeastern research hubs have generated about $8 billion in gross licensing income and $4.2 billion in running royalty income from 2021 to 2025, assisting the launch of 4,823 startups and generating 2,331 products. Gross licensing income denotes fixed, upfront fees paid by companies to patent holders for the use of their patented discoveries in commercial products, while running royalties are variable, periodic payments paid by companies to patent holders, typically based on the product’s sales performance.
While Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York and New Hampshire are cited as being “among the nation’s strongest performers,” it noted the discovery by researchers at Yale University of the anti-HIV properties of Zerit, an antiretroviral medication, as one of the region’s federally funded “notable innovations.” Joe Allen, Executive Director of the Coalition, also gave Yale’s discovery of sustained drug delivery technology, which can carry multiple medicines directly to a targeted site, such as a tumor, and UConn’s discovery of a protein-based artificial retina for use by patients with retinal disease, as two other notable innovations backed by federal funding.
Looking at Connecticut specifically, the report credits state universities, hospitals, and companies with bringing 35 products and 158 start-ups to market from 2001 to 2025, and the Act for netting these research hubs a total of $81,967,869 in gross licensing income and $35,599,197 in running royalty income from 2021 to 2025. Compared to other states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, which the report included, Connecticut punches above its weight; despite being tied with Mississippi in bringing the 37th most products to market, Connecticut has made the 23rd most start-up companies and the 23rd most in gross licensing and running royalty income.
“Bayh-Dole is often discussed as a federal patent-policy question, but its effects are felt locally: in university laboratories, startup incubators, research parks, hospitals, manufacturing facilities, and small businesses in every part of the country,” said Allen.
Connecticut’s research universities, chiefly Yale and UConn, remain significantly impacted by federal officials’ clampdown on federal research grants. In July, the Hartford Courant reported that UConn has lost over $100 million in federal research funding and that Yale, which received around $900 million in federal funding in 2024, has had “dozens” of federal grants terminated. In May, Gov. Ned Lamont approved the disbursement of $35 million from the state’s Federal Cuts Response Fund to replace some of these held-up federal funds.
Per Grant Witness, a self-professed group of researchers, data scientists, and lawyers who work to track the status of federal research grant funding, Connecticut state agencies and universities are still fighting to receive $20 million in unpaid National Institutes of Health grants, $8.7 million in National Science Foundation grants, and $5.7 million in Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality grants. Additionally, UConn is still fighting to receive $5.8 million in unpaid EPA grants.
“Preserving federal research funding and reliable patent rights is not simply an academic or legal issue; It is a competitiveness issue,” said Allen. “If the United States wants the next generation of life-saving therapies, advanced technologies, and high-growth companies to be developed here, we must protect the framework that makes American innovation investable.”
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