The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has recently taken out a booklet on Intellectual Property Rights & Technology Transfer which will help increase awareness among ICMR scientists for protecting new technologies.

This document, which has detailed FAQs on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), is an effort by the ICMR in the direction to increase awareness of IP protection before publication. The booklet has been prepared by a group of experts under the chairmanship of Professor Seyed Hasnain.

Ever since its creation in 1999, the IPR Unit at ICMR has been striving hard to promote innovation and research that would lead to patentable leads. The Unit has geared itself over to create an inventor-friendly system for scientists to consider protection of new knowledge created as new intellectual property before publication in peer reviewed journals.

For the past many years, scientists working with the support from the Indian Council of Medical Research have been carrying out high quality research to achieve its objectives. Any new information or data generated in the laboratory are immediately published for its widest dissemination and application for public good.

In line with this, a new system has been devised for ensuring that the new inventions or leads obtained in the laboratory are eligible for patent protection. For this purpose, a simple reporting proforma has been designed to help researchers report their new inventions.

This system has worked reasonably well and many researchers (both intra and extramural) are becoming increasingly conscious of the need and importance of protecting such new knowledge generated through appropriate IPR systems before publication.