Friday, January 05, 2001

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MSNBC New gene patent guidelines issued
"New guidelines aimed at stopping companies from making frivolous attempts to patent genes before they really have any use for them were issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Friday."

"THE GUIDELINES put to rest any question about whether genes can be patented, making it clear that companies may indeed patent genes or even pieces of genes — if they are associated with a specific use, such as the development of a disease.

"The guidelines are barely changed from interim rules issued a year ago, when to show “utility,” an applicant had to prove that the discovery had credible and specific uses. Now they must also show that use is “substantial, that it has real world value,” Chambers said.

redux [12.16.00]
The Street Biotech Today, Part 2: Is the Human Genome Land Grab Over?
"For years, Dr. J. Craig Venter has been saying that the human genome probably had fewer than 60,000 genes. Heck, Dr. C. nailed most of them when he worked in partnership with Human Genome Sciences (which said back in 1996 that they'd found 96% of the human genes). Now Eric Lander of the famed Whitehead Institute at M.I.T. --- a man who has had his differences with Craig --- has also come out and said that there are fewer than 50,000 genes in the human genome.

The fact that these words have been on the airwaves for years doesn't mean that most investors have heard them. (The axiom "there are 100,000 genes in the human genome" has been pretty deeply drilled into a lot of our brains.) So at our shop, we've been proceeding under the assumption that the big genome land grab happened years ago but a large number of investors haven't noticed that fact. We also assume that most of what will transpire over the next few years will be lawsuits and cross-licensing: We refer to it as the coming "litigation conflagration."

What I'm thinking through at the moment are the implications: Specifically, how will investors react when a critical mass of them realize there are fewer than 50,000 genes -- and most of them are already spoken for?"

redux [04.26.00]
Signals Homestead 2000: The Genome
""The analogy that I would use is that of a minefield," said Bob Levy, senior VP of science and technology for American Home Products. "We are spending an incredible amount of time now, when we find exciting targets and begin to validate them, in trying to define who has rights to what. And we're finding, in almost every product that we look at, that someone has patented the protein, the gene, a fragment, a diagnostic test." Levy noted that untangling patent rights, and determining which patents are dominant, are increasingly time-consuming and expensive tasks. And patent-holders must be paid. "The royalties that will be involved soon in some of the products that we are bringing to market, they're already up into the ten, fourteen, fifteen percent [range]," said Levy. "And that may increase with time.""

redux [08.26.00]
MIT Technology Review The Great Gene Grab
"Biotech companies are snapping up patents on human genes. Will the trend mean powerful new medicines, or will it quash biomedical innovation?"

MIT Technology Review The Case for Gene Patents
"Nowhere are patents more central to the creative process than in genetic drug development, where human genes and their expressed proteins themselves are developed as therapies. The biotechnology industry in the United States has brought a handful of these crucial new products (recombinant human insulin, to name one of the most familiar) to market and is on the threshold of a bonanza of genetic drugs and vastly greater relief for ill and aging populations around the world.

Patent protection is the sine qua non of that bonanza."

MIT Technology Review Toward Sharing the Genome
"The raw data of the human genome should be an “IP-free zone,” opines author Seth Shulman, to preserve our precious shared genetic heritage and update outmoded notions of intellectual property."