All your base belong to us. Company gets patent on human genes.

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19294050

A court in the US has again backed a biotech company's right to patent genes which have been isolated from the human body.
...
Myriad Genetics has patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which are strongly linked to breast and ovarian cancer.
...
The patents are valuable as they give the owners exclusive rights to diagnostic tests for the genes. One of the questions in the case was whether isolating a gene makes it different to one still in the body.
...
"Importantly, the court agreed with Myriad that isolated DNA is a new chemical matter with important utilities which can only exist as the product of human ingenuity."
...
"This ruling prevents doctors and scientists from exchanging their ideas and research freely."

Bad precedent.

Since the human genome has been sequenced will there now be a feeding frenzy as patent trolls do a land grab ?

This means the company can prevent anyone else developing a test for those genes.

Could descendent of those people be sued for patent infringement ?

Surely DNA by definition has been published / expressed as prior art - some genes are billions of years old and the human genome has already been published. :mad:


I have far less problem if this is a methodology of extracting a DNA sequence (patents on human health really get my goat, since almost all the money for healthcare and medicine comes from the public purse or health insurance necessitated because the cost of medicine is too high for the public purse, not to mention that the tax discounts mean that private health insurance is effectively state funded)

JohnMarston

So, will i have to buy the patent for my own DNA?

Colmustard

Its one of those things that feels wrong but i'ts not.

If you are a pharmaceutical company and you want to invest in new treatments, its space exploration money, it cost millions and millions and it is very risky, not all treatments will get approval.

So to insure a return on that investment you need the patents. Without this decision we would never get genetic treatments which is the future of medicine.

Boombastic

Who gave the US court the right to decide who can patent it?

Capt'n Midnight

Colmustard wrote: »

Its one of those things that feels wrong but i'ts not.

If you are a pharmaceutical company and you want to invest in new treatments, its space exploration money, it cost millions and millions and it is very risky, not all treatments will get approval.

So to insure a return on that investment you need the patents. Without this decision we would never get genetic treatments which is the future of medicine.

If big pharma spent as much on R&D as it does on marketing budget then you might have a point.

At present R&D is about 1/3rd of the marketing budget.
For most products production costs are nearly 0% of retail price.

And like I've said the public purse pays for most of this directly through healthcare , or indirectly through tax breaks. They are essentially for-profit publicly funded charities that spend many times more on fundraising than on beneficial works.


Also since you are ignoring all publicly funded research in hospitals and universities and other institutes, you'll have to admit that big pharma's marketing of their R&D costs can be considered by them money well spent.

hooradiation

Boombastic wrote: »

Who gave the US court the right to decide who can patent it?

What is Section 2, Article Three of the United States Constitution, Alex?

seantorious

They might patent a gene but it isn't worth anything. Ultimately if any other company is sued by them for abusing this patent they will win the case.
You cant patent a phenomenon only an exploitation of the phenomenon. You can patent a drug that changes the DNA not the DNA itself
This was decided during the human genome sequence project when a private company threatened to patent any discoveries it made.

ejmaztec

Good job mine isn't human, the feckers.

Colmustard

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

If big pharma spent as much on R&D as it does on marketing budget then you might have a point.

At present R&D is about 1/3rd of the marketing budget.
For most products production costs are nearly 0% of retail price.

And like I've said the public purse pays for most of this directly through healthcare , or indirectly through tax breaks. They are essentially for-profit publicly funded charities that spend many times more on fundraising than on beneficial works.


Also since you are ignoring all publicly funded research in hospitals and universities and other institutes, you'll have to admit that big pharma's marketing of their R&D costs can be considered by them money well spent.

One third of big pharma marketing budget is a lot of money, of the top 50 companies in the world, at least 10 of them would be big pharma. I don't particularly see anything wrong with big spending on marketing a company has to remain profitable.

There are publically funded research but I would still say most research is done by big pharma.

tolosenc

Boombastic wrote: »

Who gave the US court the right to decide who can patent it?

I hold the patent on granting patents!

I'd better sue!

mathie

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

If big pharma spent as much on R&D as it does on marketing budget then you might have a point.

At present R&D is about 1/3rd of the marketing budget.
For most products production costs are nearly 0% of retail price.

Whats the point in creating products if nobody knows about them?

ScumLord

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

This means the company can prevent anyone else developing a test for those genes

In the US, US patents don't apply over here. If I have an Irish patents it doesn't stop Chinese, American or any other European nation from ripping off the idea. They'd need to get patents for each zone for it to be worldwide.

mawk

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

If big pharma spent as much on R&D as it does on marketing budget then you might have a point.

At present R&D is about 1/3rd of the marketing budget.
For most products production costs are nearly 0% of retail price.

And like I've said the public purse pays for most of this directly through healthcare , or indirectly through tax breaks. They are essentially for-profit publicly funded charities that spend many times more on fundraising than on beneficial works.


Also since you are ignoring all publicly funded research in hospitals and universities and other institutes, you'll have to admit that big pharma's marketing of their R&D costs can be considered by them money well spent.

id like to see a very good cite for that 1/3rd line.
phase 3 trialling at the moment is up to about 800 million euro. I very much doubt that marketing costs that much

Colmustard

mawk wrote: »

id like to see a very good cite for that 1/3rd line.
phase 3 trialling at the moment is up to about 800 million euro. I very much doubt that marketing costs that much

I don't know but I wouldn't, these companies make massive profits and they are truly multinational in all world market and how many adds on tele are about pain killers and indigestion remedies. They do also promote other treatments in other way. But I don't see anything wrong with that.

One viagra pill costs about a tenner, it costs nothing to make, so imagine the return.

Capt'n Midnight

mathie wrote: »

Whats the point in creating products if nobody knows about them?

Health care professionals can learn about valid products in peer reviewed magazines etc.

The marketing is for the general public to "ask for it by name" instead of asking a pharmacist or doctor for something for an upset stomach


compare the prices of generic products with heavily branded ones and you'll get an idea of how much marketing costs. Look at ibuprofen / paracetamol / aspirin.


look at how much technobabble there is in drug marketing - our laws are tougher than the US ones so we are paying extra for drugs to subsidise marketing them to the US public

Boombastic

hooradiation wrote: »

What is Section 2, Article Three of the United States Constitution, Alex?

the right to bear arms?:)


I want bear arms

Capt'n Midnight

mawk wrote: »

id like to see a very good cite for that 1/3rd line.
phase 3 trialling at the moment is up to about 800 million euro. I very much doubt that marketing costs that much

http://blogs.plos.org/speakingofmedicine/2012/03/07/pharmaceutical-rds-costly-myths/ development costs are lower than the industry would like you to believe, half the cost is the accounting fiction of opportunity cost of not investing the money elsewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_marketing
key point here is that there is one sales rep for every eight doctors


also it's possible that they've spend more on fines related to mis-marketing than R&D over the last few years
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/international-business/Unfair-practices-Pharma-companies-fined-13bn-in-4-years/articleshow/14972186.cms

In the past four years, leading members of Big Pharma like GlaxoSmithkline, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Merck, Abbot, Eli Lilly and Allergen have paid about $13 billion in fines to settle charges of misleading marketing, promising what drugs don't do, bribing doctors to get their drugs prescribed, causing sometimes fatal side-effects, and other crimes

look at how much the HSE has been able to save by using generics / haggling over patented stuff

ressem

As I read it, they've had the patent for a dozen years now, but it was challenged. The appeals court decided 2 to 1 that because examining the gene involves a process that transforms it into a non-natural form prior to examination it can be eligible for patent.

we conclude that the composition claims and the screening claim involving growing a transformed host cell meet the standards for patent eligibility,

And that it's the responsibility of Congress to say otherwise. It'd definitely be a fiery issue to throw into the presidential debate.

Which looks like it opens up a land grab where the cleaved and isolated DNA subsection is patentable. I would have thought that the human genome project(s) have prior art on much of this information?

Though since the abstract claims of comparing were ineligible, if someone uses another method to create a transformed host cell they might be able to avoid the license fee (or get their own patent).

The consequence is...

http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/10-1406.pdf wrote:

Myriad, however, was not the only entity to implement clinical BRCA testing services. Starting in 1996, the University of Pennsylvania’s Genetic Diagnostic
Laboratory (“GDL”), co-directed by plaintiffs Haig H.
Kazazian, Jr., M.D. and Arupa Ganguly, Ph.D., provided BRCA1/2 diagnostic services to women. By 1999, however, accusations by Myriad that GDL’s BRCA testing services infringed its patents forced the lab to stop providing such services.
...
Yet, both Drs. Chung and Ostrer state that, although they conduct
gene sequencing, they are forbidden from informing their
research subjects of the results of their BRCA tests without first sending the samples to Myriad.

I guess that most of us would agree with the dissenting judges view that

The cleaving of covalent bonds incident to isolation is itself not inventive, and the fact that the cleaved molecules have terminal groups that differ from the naturally occurring nucleotide sequences does nothing to add any inventive character to
the claimed molecules. The functional portion of the composition—the nucleotide sequence—remains identical to that of the naturally occurring gene