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Published online 2 December 2008 | 456, 556 (2008) | doi:10.1038/456556a
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Europe to pay royalties for cancer gene
BRCA1 patent decision may be ignored in clinics.
It has been one of the toughest, and most impenetrable, biological patent cases in the history of the European Patent Office. But the University of Utah in Salt Lake City has finally won its battle to keep some European patents on BRCA1 — a gene associated with breast and ovarian cancer.
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The patent system is neither a law of nature nor a commandment from heaven, and cases like this one emphasize the need to start looking for a better way. We need to ensure that companies receive fast, fair rewards for meaningful innovations without decade-long legal battles. These rewards must stimulate rather than prohibit competitive research and development. In an age of unaffordable health care, we need a system that does not tax the sick - or those of a certain genetic ancestry - to provide these rewards. The present system leaves enough room for improvement that we should not be shy about proposing new alternatives.
I agree with Mike. Taxing the sick for a screening test is outrageous and unfair. While the drug and biotechnology companies do spend a lot of resources on uncovering new drug targets and biomarkers, once the biomarker has proven to be of immense clinical utility, alternative methods of measurement of that biomarker (or gene sequence) should not be subject to patent laws. The biomarkers themselves are not the "intellectual property" of these companies. They are part and parcel of all of our bodies. Would you consider cholesterol or say, mammographic density or the levels of alpha-fetoprotein to be patent-able entities? Perhaps the exact chips used in the measurement of these biomarkers (including gene-sequences) could be patented but not genes and mutations themselves. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever and is completely illogical.