Never Mind the Epidemic, Who Gets Patent Rights For the Cure?

A virus that has so far killed nearly thirty people in seven countries faces a non-medical obstacle to treatment: Patents. Reader Presto Vivace writes with this excerpt from the Council on Foreign Relations: "At the center of the dispute is a Dutch laboratory that claims all rights to the genetic sequence of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus [MERS-CoV]. Saudi Arabia's deputy health minister, Ziad Memish, told the WHO meeting that "someone"--a reference to Egyptian virologist Ali Zaki--mailed a sample of the new SARS-like virus out of his country without government consent in June 2012, giving it to Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam."

It's not a patent

[ColdWetDog]

It's a Material Transfer Agreement that means you agree to some restrictions including sharing / ceding patent rights. (That's OK, it's Timothy, we don't exactly expect accuracy here.)

But the real answer is 'so what'? Berne Convention, be damned. Countries with a vested interest in this issue aren't going to let some weenie little Dutch lab push them around.

And they got the material illegally in the first place.

I'll go back to breathing normally now.

Just make patents full ownership

[Solandri]

You reap all the rewards, but you're also responsible for all the harm. So if you want to claim you own a virus, then you're also fiscally and criminally liable for any harm that virus does. It also takes care of the Monsanto case where farmers who unknowingly have GMO crop blown onto their fields are successfully sued for patent infringement, but when organic farms who don't want the GMO stuff try to sue Monsanto for the same thing, Monsanto claim they have no responsibility for Nature spreading their seed around.

Re:It's not a patent

[St.Creed]

It's not patented... *sigh*

What the lab did was to sequence the genome and then (oooh evil) expect to get paid for that work if someone else wanted to use THEIR work to build something with that. That's the modus operandi of every other genetics lab in the world - they all analyze stuff and then provide results to paying customers.

The Dutch lab is not blocking anyone from sequencing the genome themselves - that's a problem with *Saudi-Arabia*, they didn't even want to send the virus out to anyone in the first place for fear it would reflect badly upon their country. If the Saudi's sent out the virus to the CDC and other labs, for instance, this issue wouldn't be an issue, now would it?

The article is completely and wildly off the mark, and the summary is confusing the issue even more, if that's even possible.

Re:It's not a patent

[AK Marc]

"Virus data placed under EULA"

There, happy?