Patenting gene sequences

Precision medicine at the crossroads

There are bioethical, institutional, economic, legal, and cultural obstacles to creating the robust-precompetitive-data resource that will be required to advance the vision of “precision medicine,” the ability to use molecular data to target therapies to patients for whom they offer the most benefit at the least risk. Creation of such an “information commons” was the central recommendation of the 2011 report Toward Precision Medicine issued by a committee of the National Research Council of the USA (Committee on a Framework for Development of a New Taxonomy of Disease; National Research Council. Toward precision medicine: building a knowledge network for biomedical research and a new taxonomy of disease. 2011). In this commentary, I review the rationale for creating an information commons and the obstacles to doing so; then, I endorse a path forward based on the dynamic consent of research subjects interacting with researchers through trusted mediators. I assert that the advantages of the proposed system overwhelm alternative ways of handling data on the phenotypes, genotypes, and environmental exposures of individual humans; hence, I argue that its creation should be the central policy objective of early efforts to make precision medicine a reality.

Phase changes in the BRCA policy domain

The recent US Supreme Court ruling against gene patenting has been accompanied by the passage at the federal level of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, both events representing a thawing or phase change in policies that will now make preventive techniques, such as BRCA genetic testing to predict risk for familial breast and ovarian cancer, more affordable and accessible. Authors including Yun-Han Huang in this journal have noted the judicial ruling is one step--a significant one--in the process of patent system reform. This commentary links such changes with policy formation and action taken by members of diverse religious communities in the aftermath of the Human Genome Project and continuing in today's genome sequencing area. Religious engagement has acted as a catalyzing force for change in the creation and dissemination of genetic developments. Religious perspectives are needed to solve the new ethical dilemmas posed by population screening for BRCA mutations and the rise of direct-to-consumer and provider marketing of such genetic tests, which have far-reaching consequences at the individual, family, and societal levels.

Innovations and intellectual property: the case of genomic patenting

In an effort to balance static and dynamic efficiency in the production and use of knowledge, societies institute intellectual property policies. In the United States, the patent system is a well-established mechanism to provide inventors with time-limited protection of new technologies in exchange for disclosure of information about their inventions. Emerging biotechnology, specifically the filing of patents on gene sequences, raises serious questions about whether the patent system is appropriately weighing societal costs and benefits in its grants of intellectual property protection. Gene sequences represent a hybrid case between discrete inventions and more general pieces of information that are useful for many, potentially very different, purposes. This information content in genes makes it possible for a patent on a gene to cover a wide range of possible technological applications and, as a result, be of unknown breadth when issued. This analysis explores the potential effect of these characteristics on future innovation in biotechnology.

Human gene patents: core issues in a multi-layered debate

After ten years of debate Directive 98/44/EG on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions was adopted in 1998. This directive takes decisions on some controversial bioethical and legal issues and offers the European biotech industries more space to develop their inventions, but leaves a number of philosophical and moral issues unresolved. This paper distinguishes between different layers in the debate and maps its modes of argumentation. Major philosophical, ethical and conceptual issues are located. It is argued that further analysis of these issues can help resolve further ethical and legal difficulties as regards patenting of human DNA. As the allegedly special status of genetic material remains unclear, the status of (human) DNA and its relation to the human body and personal identity should be further explored.