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a Printer-Friendly Version of this Web Page! <%end if%> Molecular biology and intellectual property has already presented the patent system with new categories of patentable material, for which case law - which of necessity looks to the past for guidance - cannot always be expected to provide adequate guidance. One can expect advances in molecular biology to continue to pose new and unexpected challenges to our intellectual property traditions. As science continues to present new challenges, case law will inevitably lag behind the science. Because the useful applications of advances in molecular biology are so closely tied to basic research, it is particularly important to strike the right balance between the twin goals of fostering the growth of scientific knowledge and promoting private investment in the development of applications for new technology. In many cases, those goals can be encouraged by the same strategies; in others, the strategies might conflict. The balance is not likely to be achieved through any single policy and clearly requires the close and continued attention of people concerned with the science and application of molecular biology. Intellectual Property Rights and Research Tools in Molecular Biology, Summary of a Workshop Held at the National Academy of Sciences, Feb. 15- 16, 1996, National Academy Press, 1997 http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/property/7.html#chap7 Biopharmaceutical
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Finding guide to terms in these glossaries Site
Map American Intellectual Property Law Association: http://www.aipla.org/ anti-trust: Healthcare Anti-trust Issues, Federal Trade Commission http://www.ftc.gov/bc/healthindex.htm anti-trust guidelines: The [US] Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today [Apr. 7, 2000] issued "Antitrust Guidelines for Collaborations Among Competitors." They are the first set of guidelines issued jointly by both federal antitrust agencies that address a broad range of horizontal agreements among competitors, including joint ventures, strategic alliances, and other competitor collaborations. The guidelines describe an analytical framework to assist businesses in assessing the likelihood of an antitrust challenge to a collaboration with one or more competitors. http://www.ftc.gov:80/opa/2000/04/collguidelines.htm Antitrust Guidelines for Collaborations Among Competitors, Federal Trade Commission, April 2000 http://www.ftc.gov/os/2000/04/ftcdojguidelines.pdf Related terms: Alliances competitor collaboration, NCRA National Cooperative Research Act, Research life sciences pre- competitive R&D Bayh-Dole Act: 35 U.S.C. §§ 200-211, provides the statutory basis and framework for federal technology transfer activities, including the patenting and licensing of federally funded inventions by recipient organizations. The Act permits recipients of federal grants and contracts to elect title to patentable "subject inventions" that arise with the use of federal funds. If recipients elect title, the Act requires them to file patent applications, seek commercialization opportunities, and report back to the funding agency on efforts to obtain utilization of their inventions. The Act also retains for the funding agency certain residual rights in subject inventions. [Appendix B Definitions related to Technology Transfer, Report of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Working Group on Research Tools, US June 4, 1998] http://www.nih.gov/news/researchtools/appendb.htm BioJudiciary Project: A joint project of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), Ernst & Young LLP, Arnold & Porter, Ropes & Gray and the Foundation for Genetic Medicine, Inc., is developing a new primer and resource of first resort for the federal judiciary: A Jurists' Guide to 21st Century Biotechnology. [About Biojudiciary.org] http://www.biojudiciary.org/about/ cDNA patents: See EST patents. Google = about 11, Sept, 18, 2002; about 62 Mar 1, 2007, about 216 April 9, 2009 Cohen- Boyer: Stanley Cohen's and Herbert Boyer's basic science discovery of recombinant DNA technology in 1973 sparked a revolution in biology and spurred development of the biotechnology industry. The invention’s far- reaching implications for the interconnected worlds of science, commerce, and society are suggested in what follows. .. [Biotech at 25: The founders, Univ. of California - Berkeley Library, 1999-2000] http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/Exhibits/Biotech/25.html Related term: licensing cross-licensing: A legal agreement in which two or more parties which have potentially conflicting patent claims strike a deal to share rights to the product or process in question. [PhRMA] Broader term: licensing Related term: technology transfer Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 1980: Prior to 1980, life forms were considered a part of nature and were not patentable. Diamond v Chakrabarty changed this with the 5- 4 U.S. Supreme Court decision that genetically engineered (modified) bacteria were patentable because they did not occur naturally in nature. In this case, Chakrabarty had modified a bacteria to create an oil- dissolving bioengineered microbe. [Genetics and patenting, Oak Ridge National Lab, US, 2002]http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/elsi/patents.html disease gene patents: I wish to direct my comments to the emerging pattern of exclusive licensing of so-called Disease Gene Patents. These patents generally claim a gene sequence, one or more mutations in which are found to be associated with disease or risk of disease. In addition to claims covering all uses of the chemical sequences, the patents also claim all methods of diagnosis of disease by identifying in a specific patient the disclosed genetic alleles, mutations, or polymorphisms. .. [Oversight Hearing on Gene Patents and Other Genomic Inventions, Jon F. Merz, Assistant Professor of Bioethics, Department of Molecular and Cellular Engineering, and Center for Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania, Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, July 13, 2000] http://www.house.gov/judiciary/merz0713.htm Google = about 457 Mar 1, 2007, about 667 April 9, 2009 DNA
patents: Patents
and applications included in the DPD [DNA Patent database] are identified
by a search algorithm that captures documents with a nucleic-acid specific term
in its claims section and also with a relevant classification code. Terms
specific to nucleic acids include “DNA,” “RNA,” “nucleotide,”
polynucleotide,” etc. The relevant class codes are those designated by the Google = about 31,200 Mar 1, 2007, about 8,920 April 9, 2009 Broader term: gene patents Related term: cDNA patents; Broader term: gene patents electronic notebook: See the definition developed by the Collaborative Electronic Notebook Systems Association (CENSA) Global Industry End User Members. http://www.censa.org/censaorgfiles/Publications/definition_electronic_notebook.html Next Generation Electronic Notebooks SR Sachs, R. Fateman, J. Landay, , Lawrence Berkeley Lab, 1999 http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cache/papers/cs/9311/http:zSzz...pdff enablement criterion: See under patents EPO European Patent Office: An international patent- granting authority established under the European Patent Convention (EPC), which was signed in Munich on 5 October 1973 and came into force on 7 October 1977. The EPO has its headquarters in Munich, a branch in The Hague, and sub- offices in Berlin and Vienna. The EPO is not an EU institution. It is completely self- financing and has a large degree of administrative autonomy. Its operating and investment budgets are funded entirely from procedural fees and from part of the annual renewal fees levied on granted European patents. [European Patent Office website] http://www.european-patent-office.org/epo_general.htm#organ EST patents: The PTO ruled that ESTs -- short sequences of coding DNA derived, assembly-line style, from messenger RNA extracted from cells -- were patentable in the early '90s. ,,No one knows how many ESTs are in line waiting for patents -- not even the PTO. "We quit tracking them," says John Doll, the PTO's director of biotechnology examination. "We had about a half a million, and that was about four years ago." [Ken Garber, Homestead 2000: The Genome, Signals Magazine, Recombinant Capital, Mar. 3, 2000] http://www.signalsmag.com/signalsmag.nsf/0/FD168FB6C42ACF6E882568950015E2D0 Google = about 153 Sept. 18, 2002; about 457 Mar 1, 2007 European Federation of Intellectual Property: http://www.efipweb.org/links.php exclusivity and patents: Orange Book FAQ #1, FDA http://www.fda.gov/cder/ob/faqs.htm experimental use: See under patent infringement gene fragments: USPTO has issued a few patents for gene fragments. Full sequence and function often are not known for gene fragments. On pending applications, their utility has been identified by such vague definitions as providing scientific probes to help find a gene or another EST or to help map a chromosome. Questions have arisen over the issue of when, from discovery to development into useful products, exclusive right to genes could be claimed. ... Patent applications for such gene fragments [ESTs, cDNAs] have sparked controversy among scientists, many of whom have urged the USPTO not to grant broad patents in this early stage of human genome research to applicants who have neither characterized the genes nor determined their functions and uses. In December 1999, the USPTO issued stiffer interim guidelines stating that more usefulness must now be shown before gene fragments are considered patentable -- specifically how the product functions in nature. The new rules call for "specific and substantial utility that is credible," but some still feel the rules are too lax. [Resources for Genetics and patents, Human Genome Project, Oak Ridge National Lab, US, 2002] http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/elsi/patents.html gene patent guidelines: See utility patent guidelines (Jan. 2001) gene patents: Much of the controversy surrounding patenting genes stems from a misunderstanding of the limitations of patent law. Numerous media sources often refer to "gene patents." This term is imprecise and can lead to the belief that it is possible to file for a blanket patent covering all the possible uses of a gene, or even a patent on the sequence itself. Further misunderstandings arise from the failure to differentiate between a patent that is pending and a patent that has been granted. .. [Patenting Genes, about.com] http://biotech.about.com/library/weekly/aa060900a.htm The controversy over gene patents emerged when Dr. Craig Venter, CEO of Celera Genomics, sent 20,000 gene sequences to the PTO, claiming patents to the sequences and to procedures that would be used to diagnose disorders with the genes. The PTO denied these applications, suggesting that simply finding DNA sequences and claiming their use as a research reagent was not sufficient for a patent. The PTO thus indicated that it required the inventor of a gene to show a level of utility beyond the gene’s use as a research tool. ¶ 6 The standard of utility wielded by the PTO, however, has been far from clear. [THE FATE OF GENE PATENTS UNDER THE NEW UTILITY GUIDELINES, Feb. 28 , 2001, Duke Law and Technology Review, Cite as 2001 Duke L. & Tech. Rev. 0008] http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/ARTICLES/2001dltr0008.html Google = about 3,970 Sept. 18, 2002; about 137,000 Mar 1, 2007, about 35,700 April 9, 2009 Beginner's guide to gene patents,
Guardian, UK, 2000 http://www.guardian.co.uk/genes/article/0,2763,397385,00.html Narrower terms: cDNA patents, disease gene patents, EST patents, gene fragments, SNP patents; Related terms: utility guidelines; Gene definitions gene genetic discrimination: Molecular diagnostics & Genetic testing genomic patents: Allen K Yu, Why it is time to eliminate genomic patents, Paper 1473, Berkeley Electronic Press, 2006 http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6667&context=expresso Google = about 3,310 Mar 1, 2007 genomics - legal aspects: Genetics in the courtroom, HGMIS, DOE, US http://www.ornl.gov/TechResources/Human_Genome/courts/courts.html#1 human life, patenting: Patenting Human Life, President's Council on Bioethics, http://www.bioethics.gov/topics/patenting_index.html intellectual property: Intellectual Property Forum: Navigating the Legal Landmine A panel of patent attorneys will discuss the challenges involved with filing for patents and avoiding intellectual property disputes. They will present specific examples to elaborate on how patent litigations are being dealt with in the genomics area. This will be followed by a series of presentations given by individuals and companies looking to patent and protect their assets in the genomics field. IP: Business of Genomics: Bridging the gap from Concept to Realization June 2009 San Francisco CA Intellectual Property, Biotechnology Industry
Organization, US http://www.bio.org/ip/ international patents: The Trilateral Offices, the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japanese Patent Office (JPO), and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) have been cooperating for the administration of their patent functions in order to gain possible mutual benefits since 1983. [US PTO website] http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/dcom/olia/ir_pat_trilateral.htm JPO Japanese Patent Office: The system of industrial property rights (which is a general terms used when referring to the system for patents, new utility models, designs and trademarks) is to contribute to development of industry by securing and protecting the successful and creative development of structures for patents, etc. The system of industrial property rights is also designed to promote development of sciences and technology. As Japan is on the threshold of the twenty first century, the importance of this system has gradually grown by a considerable amount. The role of the Patent Office is to deal with the development in the entire industrial sphere through its system for industrial property rights, including examinations, trials, and designing of plans for this system. [Japanese Patent Office website] http://www.jpo.go.jp/ license: A contract between the owner(s) of the subject matter of the license and one or more parties that seeks the right to make, use, sell, or import the subject mater of the license. Commonly, a license conveys rights to patented subject matter, but it may also convey rights to tangible subject matter that is not unpatented. Licenses are negotiated agreements that become binding contracts when signed by the parties. In the United States, only one owner need to sign a license if the subject matter is patented. Thus, a patented technology co-owned by three parties can be licensed by one of the parties without the other owners' knowledge or consent. This is not so in most European countries, which require that all owners join in any licenses. Although licenses generally address a standard set of legal issues, there is no standard license or license term. The terms negotiated into licenses by the parties are as varied as the circumstances driving the agreement. [Appendix B Definitions related to Technology Transfer, Report of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Working Group on Research Tools, US June 4, 1998] http://www.nih.gov/news/researchtools/appendb.htm licensing: Contractual agreement granting permission to use intellectual property under specific conditions. Licensing agreements, in which one company contracts to buy technology from another company, can be much faster, easier and cheaper to arrange than trying to challenge an intellectual property claim in court. Narrower term: cross-licensing; Related terms: patent pooling, research joint venture, technology transfer. licensing practices: One of the goals of U.S. patent policy is to encourage development of useful products by inventors and those to whom inventions are licensed. However, some of the recent developments described above have created a situation in which pursuit of the protected information and materials by both the for- profit and not- for- profit sector may be restricted, rather than promoted, as intended historically. Sub-optimal use is likely to result when the patent appears to others to over-value the invention and when the terms of use - that is, the licensing policies - are unduly restrictive. For example, potential licensees are frequently confronted with so-called "reach -through" provisions that would provide royalties from any downstream commercial products to those who own property that may now be of uncertain value and vague utility. This situation does not encourage vigorous development of the protected discoveries. Likewise, an inappropriate insistence on exclusive, rather than non- exclusive, licensing of genetic sequences for diagnostic tests could slow the development of this important application of genetic tools. [Harold Varmus testimony, HEARING ON GENE PATENTS AND OTHER GENOMIC INVENTIONS HOUSE JUDICIARY SUBCOMMITTEE ON COURTS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, JULY 13, 2000 http://www.house.gov/judiciary/varm0713.htm MTA Material Transfer Agreement: A negotiated contract between the owner of a tangible material and a party seeking the material and the right to use the material for research purposes. The material may be either patented or unpatented. Material transfer agreements tend to be shorter than license agreements, and they are generally/ considered to be more informal than licenses agreements, although both are enforceable contracts. The purpose of an MTA is to document the transfer and outline the terms of use, including identification of the research project, terms of confidentiality, publication, and liability. As with licenses, there are no standard MTAs, although the academic community and NIH developed an under used model MTA for biological materials called the Uniform Biological Material Transfer Agreement (UBMTA). Appendix B Definitions related to Technology Transfer, Report of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Working Group on Research Tools, US June 4, 1998 http://www.nih.gov/news/researchtools/appendb.htm See also: research tools, university- industry partnerships and intellectual property NCRA, NCRPA: Alliances pharmaceutical non-obvious: See under patents novelty: See under patents PTO Patent and Trademark Office, US: The PTO promotes industrial and technological progress in the United States and strengthens the national economy by: Administering the laws relating to patents and trademarks. Advising the Secretary of Commerce, the President of the United States, and the administration on patent, trademark, and copyright protection. Advising the Secretary of Commerce, the President of the United States, and the Administration on the trade- related aspects of intellectual property. http://www.uspto.gov/ patent: A document issued [in the United States] by the Department of Commerce Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) under authority of the United States Constitution and other laws and implementing regulations. A patent contains a narrative description of the subject matter covered by the patent called the specification. It also contains one or more claims that describe the subject matter covered by the patent in highly technical and specific terms, much as the metes and bounds of a survey might exactly describe and identify the land conveyed by a deed. A patent represents the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the subject matter described by the claims of the patent. Virtually every country in the world provides its government with the right to issue patents in order to allow patent owners to exclude others from using the patented subject matter within its borders. In the United States, only the person or people who invent the subject matter have the right to obtain a patent. However, it is commonplace for employers to require employee- inventors to assign to the employer the right to seek the patent, and therefore the ownership of the patent. [Appendix B Definitions related to Technology Transfer, Report of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Working Group on Research Tools, US June 4, 1998] http://www.nih.gov/news/researchtools/appendb.htm A patent application is judged on four criteria. The invention must be "useful" in a practical sense (the inventor must identify some useful purpose for it), "novel" (i.e., not known or used before the filing), and "nonobvious" (i.e., not an improvement easily made by someone trained in the relevant area). The invention also must be described in sufficient detail to enable one skilled in the field to use it for the stated purpose (sometimes called the "enablement" criterion). http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/elsi/patents.html Google
Patents http://www.google.com/patents Related terms: intellectual property; Narrower terms: EST patents, genomic patents, international patents, patent portfolio, patent system, provisional patent applications, SNP patents, stealth patents, submarine patents, utility patents patent acquisition: Securing intellectual property rights by means of patents. patent citation: SEE under patinformatics analysis patent infringement: patent intelligence: SEE under patinformatics patent mapping: SEE under patinformatics patent pooling: A patent pool is an agreement between two or more patent owners to license one or more of their patents to one another or third parties. A patent pool allows interested parties to gather all the necessary tools to practice a certain technology in one place, e.g, "one- stop shopping," rather than obtaining licenses from each patent owner individually. [US Patent and Trademark Office "USPTO issues white paper on patent pooling" Jan. 19, 2001] http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/speeches/01-06.htm Patent pools: A solution to the problem of access in biotechnology patents?, Jeanne Clark et al, USPTO, 2000 http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/dapp/opla/patentpool.pdf Wikipedia "patent pools" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_pool Google = about 25,900 Mar 1, 2007 patent portfolio: Patents owned and applied for. Refers to owned intellectual property, does not include licensing arrangements. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_portfolio Google = about 749,000 Mar 1, 2007 patent stacking: Taking out many patents for different aspects of a single innovation, thus forcing several royalty applications and payments. Aaron Cosbey , Sustainable Development Effects of the WTO TRIPS Agreement: A Focus on Developing Countries, International Institute for Sustainable Development, Canada, 2000 Related term: royalty stacking Google = about 967 Mar 1, 2007 patent system: The [patent system] has changed from focusing on conventional drugs to being a system that also encompasses patents on biological molecules containing genetic information. . Many thousands of patents with claims to human DNA sequences have been filed and granted, and few have as yet been subject to legal challenge. The many patents include claims for genomic DNA sequences, complementary DNAs, individual mutations, expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) [Martin Bobrow, Sandy Thomas "Patents in a genetic age" Nature 409:763-764, 15 Feb. 2001] Related terms: international patents, EPO European Patent Office, JPO Japanese Patent Office, PTO Patent and Trademark Office (US) WIPO World Intellectual Property Office patent thicket: An overlapping set of patent rights requiring those seeking to commercialize new technology obtain licensees from multiple patentees. Navigating the patent thicket, Carl Shapiro, Univ. of California, Berkeley, Mar. 2001 http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/thicket.pdf Google = about 25,400 Mar 1, 2007, about 11,300 April 9, 2009 patinformatics: Describes the science of analyzing patent information to discover relationships and trends that would be difficult to see when working with patent documents on a one-on-one basis. The term encompasses all forms of analyzing patent information, including the following: Patent intelligence — The use of patent information to identify the technical capabilities of an organization and the use of that intelligence to develop a strategy for strategic technical planning; Patent mapping — Sometimes described as white space mapping, which uses published patent data to create a graphical or physical representation of the relevant art pertaining to a particular subject area or novel invention; Patent citation analysis — the study of patent citations for potentially determining a patent's value or, perhaps more reliably, the identification of potential licensing partners or leads based on the citation of an organization's patents by another company in the same or a completely different market space Patinformatics can also cover additional applications of patent information involving a subsequent analysis step. Anthony Trippe, Patinformatics: Identifying Haystacks from Space, Searcher 10(2): Oct. 2002 http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/oct02/trippe.htm Related terms: Biopharmaceutical Algorithms data mining, Biopharmaceutical Information management text mining pre-competitive: Biopharmaceutical Research prior art: Definition and relationship to patents, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art provisional patent applications: Since June 8, 1995, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has offered inventors the option of filing a provisional application for patent which was designed to provide a lower- cost first patent filing in the United States and to give U.S. applicants parity with foreign applicants under the GATT Uruguay Round Agreements. [US PTO, "Provisional Application for Patent, Nov. 29, 2000] http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/provapp.htm A provisional application for patent is a U. S. national application for patent filed in the USPTO under 35 U.S.C. §111(b). It allows filing without a formal patent claim, oath or declaration, or any information disclosure (prior art) statement. It provides the means to establish an early effective filing date in a non- provisional patent application filed under 35 U.S.C. §111(a) and automatically becomes abandoned after one year. It also allows the term "Patent Pending" to be applied. [USPTO] reach through provisions: MTAs do not usually require financial payments at the time of the transfer, but many MTAs allow the provider to either own, or license exclusively, or obtain payments upon the sale of, developments that the recipient makes with the provider's materials. These are loosely called "reach- through" provisions, and are considered by many providers to be desirable because they allow the provider to obtain rights in subject matter that the provider would not otherwise have rights to through its ownership or patent coverage of the material alone. Reach- through provisions are considered undesirable by many recipients because they burden all the developments created after the use of the material, and because they are seen as providing an unfairly high level of compensation to the provider for use of the material. Appendix B Definitions related to Technology Transfer, Report of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Working Group on Research Tools, US June 4, 1998 http://www.nih.gov/news/researchtools/appendb.htm Patentability of reach through claims, US PTO, Jose G. Dees, Supervisory Patent Examiner http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/biochempharm/documents/patreachclaim.pps Related term: Material Transfer Agreement MTA research joint venture: Biopharmaceutical Research research tools: Biopharmaceutical Research royalty stacking: The concept of royalty stacking arises from the risk that multiple patents may affect a single product. Such a risk is said to be particularly high in the biotech field which is dominated by patent filings. …Royalty stacking arises when, in order to take a product to market, the developer of the product takes licences from all of the owners of the patents which affect the final product. When the royalty payments are added together, the licensee may find itself with a non-profitable product. Hence it has become quite usual for licensees to insist on including anti-stacking provisions in licence agreements. Vicky Clark Pitfalls in drafting royalty provisions in patent licences, Pharmalicensing, 2004 . http://pharmalicensing.com/articles/disp/1087832097_40d70021d738c Results from situations such as the development of a particular drug which could involve licensing array technology from one company, high- throughput screening from another, a gene product that was discovered by virtue of a patented SNP from a third, and a small molecule drug candidate that came from a combinatorial target library generated in partnership with a fourth. Each could call for the technology supplier to earn royalty payments on the ultimate drug. Related term: patent stacking Google = about 12,800 Mar 1, 2007 SNP Patents: In April 1999, ten large pharmaceutical companies and the U.K. Wellcome Trust philanthropy announced the establishment of a non- profit foundation to find and map 300,000 common SNPs. Their goal is to generate a widely accepted, high- quality, extensive, publicly available map using SNPs as markers evenly distributed throughout the human genome. The consortium plans to patent all the SNPs found, but they will not enforce the patents. This will be done only as a measure to prevent others from patenting the same information. [Resources for Genetics and patents, Human Genome Project, Oak Ridge National Lab, US, 2002] http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/elsi/patents.html Google = about 75 Mar 1, 2007, about 157 April 9, 2009 safe harbor: See under patent infringement stealth patents: Beware of submarine- stealth genetic patents, they can be deadly for scientific research. That was the consensus of genetic patent experts Monday at CHI's Genome Tri-Conference The biggest enemy of scientific progress, the experts said, are so- called "stealth" patents -- those which are filed on genes that researchers have located, but haven't discovered their function. They sit on the patent, sometimes for long periods of time, during which no research is done. In January [2001], the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office finalized guidelines forbidding stealth patenting, but finding these patents will be a long process. [Kristen Philipkowski "New Quest: Mapping Gene Patents" Wired, Mar 6, 2001] http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,42214,00.html Patents filed on genes which have been discovered but have unknown function(s). Also known as submarine patents. Google = about 78 Mar 1, 2007, about 221 April 9, 2009 submarine patents: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_patent See also under stealth patents. Google = about 27,000 Mar 1, 2007; about 20,600 April 9, 2009 technology transfer: Biopharmaceutical Alliances termination of agreement: Implications for participants? Anticipated conclusion in some instances? university-industry partnerships and intellectual property: The protection of intellectual property has been one of the most challenging issues in the recent proliferation of university- industry- government partnerships - largely because costs and benefits associated with protection of intellectual property are distributed unevenly among different sectors. Even though different sectors might share the general goal of providing useful innovations to society, there are vast differences in how people can contribute to this goal. [Intellectual Property Rights and Research Tools in Molecular Biology, Summary of a Workshop Held at the National Academy of Sciences, Feb. 15-16, 1996, National Academy Press, 1997 ] http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/property/6.html#chap6 utility guidelines [Jan.2001]: The utility Guidelines are applicable to all areas of technology. However, they are particularly relevant in areas of emerging technologies, such as gene- related technologies, where uses for new materials that have not been fully characterized are not readily apparent. [Press release, USPTO PUBLISHES FINAL GUIDELINES FOR DETERMINING UTILITY OF GENE- RELATED INVENTIONS, Jan. 4, 2001] http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/speeches/01-01.htm Utility Examination Guidelines, Federal Register 66 (4): 1092- 1099, January 5, 2001 Notices http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/sol/notices/utilexmguide.pdf Related term: gene patents utility patents: May be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new, useful, and nonobvious process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof. [USPTO] W3C patent policy: Working Draft http://www.w3.org/TR/patent-policy/ WIPO World Intellectual Property Organization: One of the 16 specialized agencies of the United Nations system of organizations. It administers 21 international treaties dealing with different aspects of intellectual property protection. The Organization counts 175 nations as member states. http://www.wipo.org/ An intergovernmental organization of the United Nations system. WIPO is responsible for the promotion of the protection of intellectual property throughout the world and for the administration of various multilateral treaties dealing with the legal and administrative aspects of intellectual property. [USPTO] white space mapping: SEE under patinformatics Bibliography There are a number of other legal dictionaries online (at least seven in Onelook http://www.onelook.com). The following has been the most likely to have terms I've looked for. Nolo.com Everybody's legal dictionary http://www.nolo.com/dictionary/wordindex.cfm?t=0030TOOLS03202000 Alpha biopharmaceutical glossary index How to look for other unfamiliar biopharmaceutical terms IUPAC definitions are reprinted with the permission of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. |
