发信人: biz (古怪), 信区: Biology
标 题: Should SNPs be patented?
发信站: The unknown SPACE (Mon Feb 5 17:35:47 2001), 站内信件

The SNP Consortium says, "We not only wanted to publish the information,
but prior to publishing, we wanted to effectively use the patent system
to ensure their availability. We did this by filing provisional patents
on each marker we discovered. We aggregated this date into bundles and
as we mapped them we released these bundles into the public domain.
Prior to the release, we filed a provisional patent and then after the
releas, we extinguished it saying we weren't going to execute the patent,
but we could convert it to what is called a statutory invention record,
or SIR. By doing in this way, the information goes on record at the USPTO
(US Patent and Trademark Office) that we made this invention and there's
a date of discovery on it. There is no ambiguity about it and every maker
has a date of discovery and it's registered in the USPTO."

On the other side of the battlefield is Celera Genomics. J. Venter,
Celera's president and CSO, says, "SNP data is protectable because people
can get it only through a contract. Contracts actually are stronger forms
of protection than patents sometimes. But we are also filing patens on
SNPs and haplotypes that we think are informative and important unique
reagents for mapping. I think SNPs are clearly patentable as intellectual
property both individually and in sets. The extent of that we don't know.
If we ahve a specific haloptype associated with predicting a medical
outcome, either a disease or a propensity for a toxic effect from a drug
or efficacy with a drug, it's pretty clear that those are highly protectable
and we plan to turn them into diagnostic products in our company's new
molecular entity."

--
※ 来源:．The unknown SPACE bbs.mit.edu．[FROM: 128.104.69.146]