7 ms·
The Long-Shot Bid to Put Crispr in the Hands of the People
- hprotagonist 10y agoThe Broad hands out licenses like candy if you're doing research. If you're a commercial entity, it's 100M.
- hacker_9 10y agoTake from the rich, give to the poor.
- QML 10y agoNot all commercial entities are rich. If you were a scientist who found a novel application of CRISPR and wanted to develop a product and bring it to market, you'd be effectively screwed.
- hprotagonist 10y agoWell, you'd develop a proof of concept and angle to be acquihired by Editas. I don't know that that counts as "screwed".
- QML 10y agoAcquihired implies you being acquired for your talent, but then what happens to your idea? Editas could just scrap it.
- adventured 10y agoEditas and Broad only control the US market. It's extremely unlikely Broad will acquire such a strong position in Europe or Asia (in fact it's practically guaranteed they will not). If you had such a stellar therapy, and you couldn't get it past Editas, you'd go to Europe and partner with any number of a dozen other entities there that would be guaranteed to be interested (such as Novartis, which owns part of NTLA).
- vinceguidry 10y agoJust wait for the patent to expire. Or, don't wait, build out your product, and release it the second the patent expires. If it's a good enough idea, you'll be able to find investors willing to bridge the time gap.
- stephancoral 10y agoThat's generally how a functioning and equitable society works yes
- kobeya 10y agoGood luck getting funding for a Crispr startup.
- jghn 10y agoI'd imagine that they'd be willing to license the technology to a startup for a stake in the company or something like that.
- dekhn 10y agoThe bar is pretty high for anybody who wants to make a product based on in-human CRISPR: https://www.broadinstitute.org/partnerships/office-strategic-alliances-and-partnering/information-about-licensing-crispr-genome-edi https://www.broadinstitute.org/partnerships/office-strategic... In short, if you want to sell a product, Editas gets right of first refusal to license from Broad, and only if they refuse would the startup be able to proceed to license. If you just want to use CRISPR for in house research, you have to license it; no idea if the fees are prohibitive.
- zackbloom 10y agoIt is a nonprofit after all, I would much rather have them have the patent than a biotech company.
- Glyptodon 10y agoGreat way to guarantee only giant conglomerates can commercialize anything.
- hprotagonist 10y agoThat's already true, and it's got nothing to do with licensing tech, and everything to do with how much money it costs to build out a supply chain.
- jghn 10y ago100M is an exaggeration but still I think that's fine. Enable people doing research for the benefit of others access to their stuff, but if someone is going to get rich off of it why not take a cut?
- hprotagonist 10y agono, it's about right... https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsherkow/2017/02/21/how-much-is-a-crispr-patent-license-worth/#34b798e86b77 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsherkow/2017/02/21/how-muc... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-24/the-gene-editing-tool-on-every-drugmaker-s-wish-list-this-year https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-24/the-gene-...
- jghn 10y agoI was assuming they meant in general, not just CRSPR. $100m would be an enormous amount of money for the Broad and they license all kinds of stuff regularly
- adventured 10y agoIt's not remotely close to $100m Editas acquired Cpf1 exclusivity for just $16 million upfront [1], in the form of cash plus a note. Intellia and Crispr Therapeutics, as two examples, will be able to license Cas9 from Broad for their various programs for a lot closer to $20m upfront plus royalties (so far as their therapy paths don't directly collide with Editas). http://ir.editasmedicine.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=254265&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2230504 http://ir.editasmedicine.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=254265&p=irol-n...
- torbjorn 10y agoIs there some kind of letter to your congress person type thing that can be done for this? I would gladly sign a petition or write an email as part of a campaign to demonstrate public support for making access to crispr as open as possible.
- djsumdog 10y agoYour opinions and letters to congress do not affect public policy at all; not unless you're in the top 10% of income earners: http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-difference/ http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-differen...
- nickthemagicman 10y agoWhere's the line between benefiting the creator of a tool and putting a wall up around a tool that can benefit all of humanity?
- QML 10y agoI don't know much about patent law, but why not just allow for open use? If a person wants to use that tool in a for profit company, then they just pay royalties. Else, just let it. S.
- amelius 10y agoImho, patents should work like this: Company or private person submits a patent. The government determines what they would pay to make the technology open (i.e., benefits to society). This is similar to the process of determining the subsidy to develop new technology. Government makes an offer. Submitter can accept or reject. If rejected, the patent remains secret, but other companies have the right to independently invent the same technology. If accepted, the patent is published. If other companies want to use the technology, they will need to buy a license from the government. Submitter has no control over who may or may not use the technology.
- technotony 10y agoIf only it was so simple. In a typical product there might be dozens or hundreds of patents. How do you decide who gets what royalty? that's a negotiation on a product by product basis and involves things like royalty stacking.
- fossuser 10y agoI think in Patent law benefiting the creator isn't even part of the balance (at least not directly). The purpose was to prevent trade secrets by offering temporary legal protection if the creator gives the public details about the invention. Without patents there's a risk that the creator keeps their invention secret forever and then it's forgotten. This could still happen today, but if the invention details are ever leaked you'd have no ability to stop others from making and using it and no ability to demand money for it (though you could sue the person who leaked it, but only civilly). I think in cases like this where it's unlikely to have been a trade secret anyway the justification that the patent is in the best interest of the public or is 'promoting the progress of science and useful arts' is harder to make. This is especially true when the research is the result of public funding (though I'm not sure that was true in this case).
- jfarlow 10y agoFor better or worse, it now appears the Crispr system is an entire generic 'immune system' with many variants found across many species. It is not a singular exotic find. Though the most used variant of Cas9 was first found in the bacteria that causes strep throat, we've since found similarly effective proteins in all sorts of other organisms. Just a couple of weeks ago a few more variants of the system were published after being found in archaea through a large bioinformatics search.[1] Some of the new CasX, and CasY proteins [2] in these alternative crispr systems are actually even smaller than the original Cas9 proteins. I'm not sure how related it is, but the land grab associated with a broad patent has come with a large exploration effort to find alternatively systems that still provide similar utility. As these kind of synthetic biology tools come online there definitely needs to be some reanalysis of how the tools should comport with the patent system, it being ultimately for the public good. As what's being built today in synthetic biology is very much the nascent infrastructure, the comparison to the rollout of the internet is not an unfair comparison. [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v542/n7640/full/nature21059.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v542/n7640/full/nature2... [2] https://serotiny.bio/api/parts/10465 https://serotiny.bio/api/parts/10465
- doctorpangloss 10y ago> it being ultimately for the public good I think what pisses people off is the preponderance of insiders. People who buy Editas before the court results go public, but have enough inside information to deduce Broad would win the ruling. If you think it's impossible for insiders to figure out how a court ruling will go based on private proceedings, you're forgetting that they discovered CRISPR in the first place and are way savvier overall. It doesn't matter if Broad loses an appeal. It doesn't matter if there is even a single therapy ever developed with Cas9. The stock jumped 29%. Every insider made huge money off information that wasn't public. You can't go and investigate every trade, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that's what pisses people off. It's not the public good part. Believe me, no one cares about the million other patents the MIT licensing office owns that won't make any money. Nobody even cares about your new invention that will take decades to develop. They just care about the preposterous get-rich-quick scheme that is the stock market reacting to court cases.
- dmix 10y ago> The law’s original intent was to patent mature discoveries, things like a genetically modified crop, or biofuel-farting yeast. Over the years, however, universities started filing patents further upstream—on everything from protein structures to bits of DNA. This frenzy of molecule-grabbing can actually work counter to Bayh-Doyle, locking up promising discoveries that don’t need help getting commercialized. “Crispr totally epitomizes that,” says Michael Eisen, a Berkeley biophysicist and long-time advocate of open science. “Everybody in the universe is chomping at the bit to use it. But patents are an obstacle to that happening right now.” I recently read "Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell and each chapter highlighting an economic concept included examples of government policy relevant to the subject. Such as rent control, price controls in agriculture, zoning, industry licensing, etc. Almost all of them had similar unintended side effects as seen here (ie, rent controls intended to reduce rent prices resulted in a shortage of affordable housing for poor people in NYC, Toronto, etc). They almost always create an imbalance where the negative side effects largely outweigh the intended benefits. I'm not sure leaving such highly technical debates, such as whether or not you can patent a low level protein, should be left for random courts to decide. How do we solve such a prevalent problem? Should the legislation then become more specific to make sure it has it's intended purpose? Or would that ultimately lead to endless complexity in law? Creating loopholes and increased difficulty/cost to implement? The easy answer that some people take is that government should largely not be involved in this type of stuff but I'm always interested in exploring alternatives. But otherwise this stuff is largely ignored outside of the usual generic complaints about regulations coming from business groups each year, yet it continues to persist as a black/white issue in politics. CRISPR is such a critical and important technology, it'd be a shame if it was held back by unintentional interpretations of law.
- djsumdog 10y agoI feel like the original supreme court decision that allowed the patenting of DNA needs to be overturned. The suit was brought by General Electric for an organism they didn't even use. Now the entire farming industry is radically different with companies like DuPont, Monsanto and BASF controlling the seed supplies for many major crops.
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- djsumdog 10y ago> like Wi-Fi or the internet, and license it on a “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” basis. No favorites. Wi-Fi patents are held by the Australian government and feed back into their University system.
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