Biotech is a rapidly emerging field of science that explores biology in ways previously unavailable and unrealized until now. For the scientists and researcher in this province, they need to find ways to protect their investment.
The West Virginia University held a lecture today addressing those concerns with law professor and biotech scholar Christopher Holman, who hails from the University of Missouri-Kansas School of Law.
The WV Records was able to speak to one of the men who made this lecture possible, WVU’s Associate Professor of Law, Shine Tu.
Professor Tu noted that copyrighting biotech work boils down to one thing: the investments made by research companies.
“Our U.S. economy has moved away from manufacturing. It’s now more [focused on] intellectual property,” he said. “Drug companies invest hundreds of millions of dollars [into research and development]. I think the latest figure that I had seen is like over $2.3 billion for each drug, one drug, to go through Phase 3 trials. Rational drug companies aren’t going to spend that kind of money without having some guarantee that the investment that they put in isn’t going to have some sort of return. I think that is one of the big reasons why this is important.”
As hundreds of millions of dollars are poured into developing drugs and research, companies need to find ways to protect their intellectual property from unauthorized usage and unauthorized replication. Copyrighting can help with that protection.
However, it is only recently that biotech firms have looked at the copyrighting process as a possible means to protect their IP.
“There was a big case that came down about two years ago, Myriad Genetics v. American Modular Pathologist. That case dealt with patents and genes. The Supreme Court in that case reaffirmed that products of nature are not patentable subject matter. However, they said that man-made engineered DNA was patentable,” Professor Tu said. “The idea here is that a lot of diagnostic medicine and gene therapy are going to be based on this DNA technology. So one alternative way that we might be able to protect it, if we can’t go through the patent route, is via the copyright route. The copyright route is going to be a much narrower protection but for a longer amount of time. It’s very analogous to computer software. Similar to computer software, DNA is simply instructions to the body to produce certain proteins. Computer programs are simply instructions to your computer to run…whatever goals that you’re trying to do. There are a lot of analogies between software and DNA. Computer software is copyrightable, so why can’t DNA be copyrighted? So the argument here is maybe since the patent system may be precluded [for engineered DNA] in certain cases, we can try to retrieve some of that protection through copyright.”
The coding is the investment. It is the intellectual property. IP has been a point of discussion among lawyers, businesses, technology firms, and the public, which is why the lecture garnered plenty of attention.
Intellectual property law is sort of a hot topic [today],” said James Jolly, Director of Marketing and Communications in WVU. “We’ve got a hundred or hundred plus, which includes our students [attending the event].”