Category | Patents


U.S. Says (Natural) Genes Should Not Be Eligible for Patents

30 Oct 2010 |  Posted by tito |  0 Comment.
0
This is interesting: Reversing a longstanding policy, the federal government said on Friday that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature. The new position could have a huge impact on medicine and on the biotechnology industry. The new position was declared in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Department of Justice late Friday in a case involving two human genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer. “We acknowledge that this conclusion is contrary to the longstanding practice of the Patent and Trademark Office, as well as the practice...



PCR Machine Patents are Dead

30 Jun 2010 |  Posted by tito |  3 Comments.
3
One of the goals of the OpenPCR project is "4. A basic understanding of PCR patents and how they affect this project". When Josh and I were first discussing OpenPCR back in March, I looked into the original PCR patents and found that they were expired as of March 2005 (US) and March 2006 (Worldwide). These patents have been expired for a little over 4 years now. This was covered somewhat by the media, in articles from Frost (2005) and PatentBarista (2006). There are other articles, but they are not freely accessible -- email us PDFs if you like and we may share them. If you're interested in reading...