I would echo some of the comments that Gay just made. The U.S. offers a very informal patent filing process. It's called a U.S. provisional patent. It's very cheap. You don't need to spend a lot of dollars with patent agents to formally structure the patent in the claims that might typically be associated with a patent.
You can literally take a manuscript, send in a fee of $150, and get a stamp. You get a date on which you claim your invention. After that date, you have one year to formalize your patent through any international patent jurisdiction. A PCT, patent cooperation treaty, is where we would go to the next step. So we have one year to file that application. We could file that in Canada as a PCT. A PCT then allows you to springboard into any other country in the world within 18 months of your first filing date.
So this is a strategy that almost any technology transfer office uses, I would say not just in Canada but probably in the world, because the U.S. offers this particular informal way of filing a patent quickly and affordably. That is recognized in all the other patent jurisdictions in the world. So this is what I call common practice.
So the real decisions have to be made within one year. You've got that 12-month cheap window to operate within. Within that year, we've got to figure out where the markets are, where the potential commercial partners are, if we're going to spend money. The big money starts at 12 months with that Canadian PCT filing, and after that you're into much heavier expenses in international jurisdictions with various translation costs, and we'll only continue investment patents to the extent we have commercial traction. Have we got somebody who's interested in the technology, somebody who wants to license it, someone who wants to pay these costs as we move forward?
So you should look at universities as a place holder. We try to create an asset and hold it for a period of time but we only have a limited bandwidth in which we can keep that investment. If we don't have commercial traction from Canadian partners or investment start-up companies, or international companies for that matter, then at some point we have to off-ramp. We can't afford to keep paying patent costs just to hold it for prospective opportunities.