Each year NIH Technology Transfer releases a list of the top 20 royalty-on-sales grossing products of the year based upon license agreements to inventions made by the NIH intramural research program. The list is broken down into four categories: vaccines and therapeutics, diagnostics, instrumentation and devices, and research materials and services. Economic growth and activity (in addition to public health) remains an important goal of federal technology transfer programs such as those at NIH.

A new addition to the list, debuting at number one, is ‘Anti-Coronavirus Antibodies’ with lead inventor John Mascola of NIAID. This is a technology selected from a library of 1,329 anti-coronavirus antibodies that led to the development of Bamlanivimab®, the first COVID-19 therapeutic made available to the public by the FDA.   If you are interested in finding out what other products were commercially successful in fiscal year 2021, you can see the full list here.