REAPING THE BENEFITS OF GENOMIC AND PROTEOMIC RESEARCH: Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation, and Public Health

In a joint project with the Science, Technology, and Law Program, a National Academies committee reviewed the patenting and licensing of human genetic material and proteins, which represents an extension of intellectual property rights to naturally occurring biological material and scientific information, much of it well upstream of drugs and other disease therapies.

The study documents the types of patents that have been issued and to whom (or applied for and by whom), differences in the criteria being applied by the U.S. and other major patent offices to the examination of such applications, and, to the extent, possible, the licensing arrangements for different types of patented materials.

In view of the substantial evidence that patents play an important role in certain kinds of biomedical innovations, especially the development of therapeutic drugs, the committee carefully considered the impact of its recommendations on investments in R&D and the commercialization of their results.

The report is available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11487#toc

A limited number of copies are available from the STEP Board, please contact step@nas.edu to request a copy.