PerspectivesAre you interested in submitting a Perspective Article? Be sure to read The Science Advisory Board's Editorial Guides for Perspective Articles. Click here. Patented Science by Wim D’Haeze, Ph.D. In an environment of substantial competition, it is important that universities, research institutes, and biotech and pharmaceutical companies protect their new technologies and discoveries by patents. Within the US, a patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the invention, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In general, the term of a new patent is 20 years from the date the application for the patent was filed, and is only effective within the United States and its territories. A patent grants the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention. According to the USPTO, there are three distinct types of patents: utility patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof; design patents may be granted to anyone who invents a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture; and plant patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new plant variety. The USPTO is charged with ensuring that inventions claimed in issued patents meet the requirements for patentability including that an invention must be novel, non-obvious, and useful. The invention must be adequately described and clearly defined in the patent application. Thus, the role of the USPTO is crucial in that it screens and selects the patents that will be granted. The USPTO serves the interest of inventors and businesses with respect to their inventions and corporate products and also reports to the proper US government administration. More importantly, the USPTO strengthens the economy through the preservation, classification, and dissemination of patent information. Notwithstanding the leading and professional role of the USPTO, there are patents issued with excessively broad claims, or with claims directed to inventions that are anticipated, obvious or have some other deficiencies that should have offended grant of the claim. Fortunately, since relatively recently, the US patent system provides the option of having a third party that may challenge a patent application thereby suggesting that it is overly broad, obvious or deficient. However, the current US opposition system appears to be very demanding for the challenger, and thus discourages defense against a patent application. New legislative steps are needed to create an open-minded US patent environment. Not surprisingly, life sciences generally contribute the majority of patent revenues, outpacing contributions from physical science and information technology. Some recent patent applications in the life sciences include a method for enriching stem cells in a population of cells comprising serially passes through liquid cell culture media, useful for treating diseases including multiple sclerosis, cardiac disease or diabetes (University of Maryland, US Department of Veterans Affairs); a cell implantation method involving the immobilization of a cell implantation substance onto the surface of an implantation base material by light irradiation, contacting the cell with the cell implantation substance and obtaining implants, useful for the regeneration of organ tissue (Toyota Chuo Kenkyusho, Japan); a new material made of ultra-fine drawn fibers of specified diameter dispersed with gas to form groups of fibers with a desired shape, useful for the separation of blood plasma and serum, and for the preparation of samples for analysis (Japan Vilene); a method for detecting prion proteins in mammalian samples by preparing a homogenate of the sample with extraction buffer, incubating the homogenate in diluted extraction buffer with protease and chaotropic agent and detecting the aberrant prion proteins (Cedi Diagnostics, The Netherlands); and a method of producing stem cells by incubating differentiated cells with a processed or activated egg extract and culturing them so that they dedifferentiate to stem cells, useful for tissue engineering and wound healing (TEI Biosciences, Boston, MA). Obviously, such genius inventions that not only required intellectual thinking but also a substantial amount of labor in order to build the basis for such inventions need to be protected by patents. Otherwise, other companies or scientific institutions may aggressively aim for the same development and file a patent application before the pioneer did. This is only one of the factors that fuels the current patent obsession noticed among many biotech companies and scientific institutions. Obtaining a patent may also provide the filing institution with a considerable amount of money that is often much more than the costs spent to develop the respective invention. This is beneficial since it provides funds that can be re-invested in research. Alternatively, patent holders might not be able to secure a sufficient return on their development costs because of lengthy periods to achieve regulatory approval for a drug, for instance, which cuts off years of the 20-year term of a patent. Nevertheless, the tempting gain of money after a patent has been granted and other factors contribute to the patent rush leading to patent applications that are based on non-novel and/or useless inventions and discoveries. Many companies’ policy is to accumulate patents, rushing to file patent applications when inventions happen to surface. Here, the USPTO and other controlling offices take up their responsibility, but it is inevitable that some applications fall through the cracks. More often than one may think, patenting may restrict open-minded scientific research. It is somehow logical that filing of a patent application is accompanied by a prohibition to publish the findings described in the patent application. Universities are forced to protect their intellectual properties and need to reconsider their habit of documenting their activities in scientific publications. This not only leads to a lack of information within certain scientific communities, but may also cause other independent research groups to perform research that is basically the same as that described within one or another patent application. Furthermore, filing a patent application may not only be used to protect an invention but also to create a scientific territory. Patenting a set of genes or a biochemical pathway ensures that other researchers cannot use those genes or pathway for their own research interests. Patent filing and scientific research are likely to be performed successfully in the Northern countries of the world. Research in developing countries of the South often suffers from poorly developed research facilities and problematic logistics that make patent filing not an obvious choice. Those developments render the economic differences between North and South even more dramatic. For example, it is not impossible that a small research but productive research group in South America investigates why crop losses due to plant pathogen infections are so persistent, but it is also likely that a company of the North notices these developments, rapidly tries to study the problem followed by filing a suitable patent, which put the Southern countries in an economically difficult situation since from then on they need not only quit the research they used to perform, but also will have to pay lots of money to get the patented pesticide to kill the bugs while preserving cultivation of the crops. And what about infectious diseases that are rapidly spreading in some developing countries? Striking the right balance between protecting patents and providing patients in developing countries with access to life-saving medicines is a great challenge facing diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. It is my strong opinion that patents are necessary and required to protect new technologies and developments, but a global organization (maybe under the wings of the United Nations) should be responsible to ensure that patent filing by research institutions and companies does not necessarily restrict the scientific research performed by others, does not fuel problems in developing countries, and does not induce abuse and unnecessary competitions among and between companies and research institutions. ### Wim D’Haeze is Bio-Engineer in Chemistry and received his Ph.D. in Biotechnology at the Ghent University (Belgium) in June 2001. His doctoral thesis work was focused on the understanding of several early steps of the symbiotic interaction between the Gram-negative soil bacterium Azorhizobium caulinodans and the tropical legume Sesbania rostrata. The initial steps require the production of bacterial compounds including signal molecules and complex surface polysaccharides, that are pivotal for invasion of the plant tissue and the formation of new organ tissues. In the three subsequent years, he performed post-doctoral research at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center at the University of Georgia (Athens, GA) dealing in part with the structural and functional characterization of azorhizobial extracellular polysaccharides. Currently, Wim D’Haeze is employed at The Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, CA) as Science Writer and focuses on a new horizon regarding the molecular basis of devastative neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, in order to screen for and develop new therapeutics. E-mail: wim.dhaeze@sbcglobal.net. ### << Previous Next >> [ View All Perspectives ] |
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