Will Patents Ruin The Most Important Biotech Discovery In Recent Years?
from the rhetorical-question dept
Although not many outside the world of the biological sciences have heard of it yet, the CRISPR gene editing technique may turn out to be one of the most important discoveries of recent years -- if patent battles don't ruin it. Technology Review describes it as:an invention that may be the most important new genetic engineering technique since the beginning of the biotechnology age in the 1970s. The CRISPR system, dubbed a "search and replace function" for DNA, lets scientists easily disable genes or change their function by replacing DNA letters. During the last few months, scientists have shown that it's possible to use CRISPR to rid mice of muscular dystrophy, cure them of a rare liver disease, make human cells immune to HIV, and genetically modify monkeys.Unfortunately, rivalry between scientists claiming the credit for key parts of CRISPR threatens to spill over into patent litigation:
[A researcher at the MIT-Harvard Broad Institute, Feng] Zhang cofounded Editas Medicine, and this week the startup announced that it had licensed his patent from the Broad Institute. But Editas doesn't have CRISPR sewn up. That's because [Jennifer] Doudna, a structural biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, was a cofounder of Editas, too. And since Zhang's patent came out, she's broken off with the company, and her intellectual property -- in the form of her own pending patent -- has been licensed to Intellia, a competing startup unveiled only last month. Making matters still more complicated, [another CRISPR researcher, Emmanuelle] Charpentier sold her own rights in the same patent application to CRISPR Therapeutics.Things are moving quickly on the patent front, not least because the Broad Institute paid extra to speed up its application, conscious of the high stakes at play here:
Along with the patent came more than 1,000 pages of documents. According to Zhang, Doudna's predictions in her own earlier patent application that her discovery would work in humans was "mere conjecture" and that, instead, he was the first to show it, in a separate and "surprising" act of invention.Whether obvious or not, it looks like the patent granted may complicate turning the undoubtedly important CRISPR technique into products. That, in its turn, will mean delays for life-changing and even life-saving therapies: for example, CRISPR could potentially allow the defective gene that causes serious problems for those with cystic fibrosis to be edited to produce normal proteins, thus eliminating those problems.
The patent documents have caused consternation. The scientific literature shows that several scientists managed to get CRISPR to work in human cells. In fact, its easy reproducibility in different organisms is the technology's most exciting hallmark. That would suggest that, in patent terms, it was "obvious" that CRISPR would work in human cells, and that Zhang's invention might not be worthy of its own patent.
Although supporters of patents will argue as usual that they are necessary to encourage the discovery of new treatments, CRISPR is another example where patents simply get in the way. The discoveries were made by scientists in the course of their work in fundamental science at academic institutions, not because they were employed by a company to come up with a new product. According to some, the basic application of CRISPR to human cells that everyone is fighting over may even be obvious. The possibility of legal action will doubtless discourage investment in companies working in this area, and thus slow down the flow of new treatments. As usual, the only ones who win here are the lawyers.
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Filed Under: biotech, crispr, dna, emmanuelle charpentier, feng zhang, gene editing, genes, jennifer doudna, patent fights, patents
Companies: broad institute, editas medicine, intellia
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Good thing this syndrome didn't begin in an earlier era
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Re: Good thing this syndrome didn't begin in an earlier era
If today's utterly insane laws had existed back then, it would have been just too difficult to bring everything together to create the hardware, and software, required for a computer to actually be usable, as anyone who tried to do so would have been sued into oblivion.
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Re: Re: Good thing this syndrome didn't begin in an earlier era
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Re: Re: Re: Good thing this syndrome didn't begin in an earlier era
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Re: Re: Re: Good thing this syndrome didn't begin in an earlier era
It's a sign of healthy competition in a still-developing market, and it's not anywhere near as big a problem as the self-serving iDiot shills proclaim it to be, in large part because Google has the historical experience of the early IBM-compatible era to look back at and help guide their decisions WRT the evolution of the platform.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Good thing this syndrome didn't begin in an earlier era
This. I always have to laugh when people who hate Android trot this out as the big problem with Android. If that's the "big problem," then Android is in really excellent shape.
Although "fragmentation" is something that developers have to deal with, the problem is really a relatively minor one.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Good thing this syndrome didn't begin in an earlier era
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Good thing this syndrome didn't begin in an earlier era
Technically you might be able to root the device and force an update but who knows if everything will work properly and if you end up bricking your device you might be out of luck.
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Re: Re: Re: Good thing this syndrome didn't begin in an earlier era
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Re: Re: Good thing this syndrome didn't begin in an earlier era
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Re: Re: Good thing this syndrome didn't begin in an earlier era
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.… The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can."
Bill Gates, "Challenges and Strategy" (16 May 1991)
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Re: Re: Re: Good thing this syndrome didn't begin in an earlier era
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Common good needs recognition
Claiming that nobody invents if they can't smell a profit is a bogus argument brought by those who themselves only act for monetary gain. As if human inventiveness lay dormant until someone invented the patent system.
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Re: Common good needs recognition
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Re: Re: Common good needs recognition
To translate the above discoveries into potentially life saving therapies will require literally hundreds of millions of dollars of (very high risk) investment. This level of investment could never materialize without the potential for a significant return and this would never be possible without the protection of patents. People may not like that reality but that doesn't make it any less real.
As for the patent itself, it's like Churchill's quote about democracy; it's the worst form of government there is with the exception of all of alternatives. The same can be said of the patent system. It's not perfect by any stretch, but if you think the above discoveries could be turned into medicine in the next 20 years without it, you're incredibly naive. (Though not as naive as thinking the UN should in some way play a role in managing innovation. I won't even touch that absurdity).
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Re: Common good needs recognition
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Re: Re: Common good needs recognition
Copyrights and patents were initially to impede the sharing of ideas so that the holders' capital could spread and harvest returns before the ideas' spread choked the rewards down.
In a world of wire transfers between banks capital has no problem keeping up but the impediments are still there so business models don't have to change (because change runs the risk of reducing revenues). The Politicians never seem to learn that the cries of pending doom if anything changes are always shone to be false after the fact.
Growing the pie by sharing instead of restricting use to a few is always better for everybody, both US and what would have been the original holders.
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It's possible that the USPTO is actually trying to stop this discovery from moving forward before it can be used against them.
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(Because it's not like they could screw things up more than our current overlords)
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/s
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Because pretty soon there will be no more inventions, huh?
What load.
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Is there an eminent domain for this?
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That's how I see it
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Will Patents Ruin The Most Important Biotech Discovery In Recent Years?
As much as I despise the patents racket, meddling with nature to create genetic mutations is even worse.
It's also highly ambivalent. On the one hand, these "scientists" claim that we need GMO because the population is exploding and there isn't enough food to feed everyone, but on the other hand those same "scientists" then claim that they need to create human mutations in order to make us live even longer, thus further exacerbating the problem of overpopulation.
Clearly these idiots need to go back to the drawing board and figure out which problem they really want to solve.
Although I think I already know what their true objective is, and it has absolutely nothing to do with "science".
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Re: Will Patents Ruin The Most Important Biotech Discovery In Recent Years?
The world moves on, whether you want it to or not, get used to it.
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Re: Will Patents Ruin The Most Important Biotech Discovery In Recent Years?
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Genes can be edited???
How the hell do you 'edit' genes in place?
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