Efforts to Restrict Gene Patenting and Licensing Would Threaten Advances in Public Health and Harm the National Economy

On February 4th, BIO hosted a media briefing on how efforts to restrict gene patenting and licensing would threaten advances in public health and harm the national economy. Participants included:

• BIO President & CEO Jim Greenwood;
• Senator Birch Bayh, co-author of the Bayh-Dole Act;
• Brian Stanton, Ph.D., Task Force Member on Intellectual Property and Access to Genetic Testing;
• Jim Davis, Ph.D., J.D., General Counsel of Human Genome Sciences, Inc.;
• Jon Soderstrom, Ph.D., Managing Director of the Office of Cooperative Research at Yale University.

At the briefing, BIO released a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius [2] regarding the potentially harmful recommendations of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health and Society (SACGHS) in its Report on Gene Patents and Licensing Practices and Their Impact on Patient Access to Genetic Tests. BIO was  joined on the letter by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), Genetic Alliance, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), and more than 20 other stakeholders in urging Secretary Sebelius to reject the Committee’s recommendations and to ensure that the fundamentals of the innovation system put in place nearly 30 years ago through the Bayh-Dole Act are preserved. A recording of the briefing is available as a podcast at http://www3.bio.org/podcasts/020410_NPC.mp3 [3].

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