When universities engage in inequitable technology transfer practices, by patenting and exclusively licensing biomedical innovations in ways enabling pricing monopoly formation, they contribute to harmful barriers to access to medicines and other health technologies for millions of people.

Universities are contributing to the violation of the social and economic rights of those unable to access novel health technologies by unquestioningly engaging in a biomedical innovation system that relies on profit-driven commercialisation of knowledge generated with public funding, and this should be considered structural violence.

Applying the lens of structural violence can help reframe the responsibilities of universities in the access to medicines debate by: (1) highlighting universities’ position in the structures of the biomedical innovation system, (2) bringing attention to the systematic inequities in knowledge dissemination and how this can result in differential health outcomes when particular groups are denied timely access to health innovations and (3) reconsidering the role of universities’ technology transfer practices in sustaining the unequal structures and power relations inherent to the biomedical innovation system.

Universities can apply equitable technology transfer practices such as non-exclusive, royalty-free licensing of biomedical innovations to promote access to health technologies, ensuring that all members of the global public can enjoy the fruits of scientific progress.