Kristin Jones, President and CEO of the Indiana Health Industry Forum, has an editorial piece in the latest Indianapolis Business Journal on the impact of the new U.S. patent law on life sciences companies:

For others, this act has been labeled an “innovation killer,” handing over market control to large corporations, driving inventors and potential entrepreneurs back into their labs to toil in secret, and basically halting America’s leadership in research and development.

For Indiana’s life sciences sector, it both raises hopes and creates challenges for continued growth.

For large or small companies, the product development life cycle for a biological therapy comes with a lot of risk. It can take a decade or more and over $1 billion to bring a product to market, and the product can fail at pretty much any point in that process. For the majority of the time in development, a company’s intellectual property is its primary asset.

For larger companies, that risk is spread across multiple products (the company’s pipeline); for smaller companies, everything may depend on the success or failure of a single molecule or protein. Large or small, intellectual property plays a huge role in a life sciences company’s valuation and business strategy.

Check out IBJ.com for the full story.