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Stem Cell Patent Halts Hospital's Collection
eldavojohn writes "It's a classic case that comes up when dealing with patents. A hospital's research on the donated brains of deceased children has been in limbo for three years because of a challenge from a patent holder. The double-edged sword of patents that spurred investment into the field will also cause chilling effects on research like the case of the Children's Hospital of Orange County. They've now been forced to shift the money from the lab to lawyers in order to deal with this ongoing patent dispute over a technique that was developed to extract stem cells at the Salk Institute. Unfortunately the Salk Institute failed to patent the technology, so a company named StemCells happily had it approved. The real disheartening news is that CHOC's Dr. Philip H. Schwartz — the doctor collecting the cells — was one of the original researchers who helped developed this technique at the Salk Institute. Now he can't even use the technique he helped create. Schwartz has since been instructed not to publicly discuss the case further. Research interests are clashing with commercial interests in a classic case that causes one to wonder if patents surrounding medical techniques like this stretch too far. As for the people that donated their dead child's brain to research, those valuable stem cell cultures have been kept in storage instead of being disseminated to research labs (which desperately need them) across the country."
A group that didn't invent it shouldn't even be able to patent it. Fuck you, "StemCells", fuck you to the grave.
So you could say that the company StemCells
::puts on sunglasses::
is causing division in this new industry?
::yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh::
Dead child brains?
Advanced medical research?
Idea-stealing profiteers and soulless lawyers, deserving of comeuppance?
I smell zombies!
-kgj
I know this is a serious topic, but... I... can't resist....
BRAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIINNNNSSSS!!!
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
How can StemCells be granted a patent for this technique? It would seem that Salk Institute can prove that it is prior art (i.e. that they utilized this technique prior to any patent claims by StemCells), invalidating the patent claim by StemCells.
dissolve as in eventually have a judge rule that the patent isn't valid? As the article points out, CHOC now has to go to court to get that handled. While the patent may
be invalid because of prior art it still takes courts and lawyers and dockets and paper to make this situation "right." What I don't understand is that if there's no
profit motive on the part of CHOC, they're doing research, why they're being prohibited from using the technique anyway? I guess it's like patenting a shovel, if anybody digs
a hole can the patent holder prohibit you from having a swimming pool?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
This is a great example of why defensive patents are necessary. The inventor can obtain the patents, then grant anyone a free, perpetual license to use the technology. Hopefully, the doctor will win the lawsuit based on his work in creating the process but it's pretty crazy that it's not certain that he can win unless his creative process was public enough to constitute prior art.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Research is a noncommercial endeavour, and as such patent infringement cannot occur. What these "researchers" were trying to do with these brains was something akin to a commercial endeavour, whereby the can extract the stem cells within the dead children's brains, grow them as eternal cell culture and cell these renewing stem cell cultures to real researchers. If they were performing non-profit research, they could use whatever technique the wanted to ... it's like a hobby.
You can go tinker with your car and fabricate a new intake manifold on your own to make it go faster, and not be afraid of being sued for patent infringement because you used some company's design for an intake manifold. When you start racing professionally with that car seeking sponsorships and purses, then you've committed patent infringement.
http://www.stemcellsinc.com/company/management.html
http://www.stemcellsinc.com/company/executiveofficers.html
http://www.stemcellsinc.com/company/scientificfounders.html
Why do you assume there has to be a profit motive in order to run amok of patents?
So to date this life-giving science has been encumbered by christian fundamentalists and unsavory patent trolls. If my america pedals itself any faster into the dark ages, ill have to resort to public flagellation as a response to the upcoming hurricane season.
Good people go to bed earlier.
They still have to go to court to get it invalidated, though.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Move to China, Russia, or Canada. After reading today's Slashdot news I don't know why anyone would want to live in the Western World.
You can't buy lab equipment since in the West that would make you a drug maker or a terrorist.
You can't create innovative software that does something better than an established market, because you're infringing on a patent. (The whole MPEG-LA thing...)
You can't grow one of the most useful plants known to man, because someone might ingest its bud and receive pleasure from it.
Honestly, Just move to another country that doesn't respect the US patents and start saving lives. I'm sure India would love to have your expertise. There is also the United Arab Emirates, and the other Oil producing nations that are actively building research facilities to help them compete when the oil runs out.
Mr. Martin M. McGlynn serves as President, Chief Executive Officer, Director of StemCells Inc....$1,324,380 per year
'Tis good to be a patent troll
Why do we have patents on life-saving techniques? Can you imagine if there was a patent on washing your hands or stitching a wound?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
A guy with a Barret M107, a handful of .50 BMG bullets with "for this patent bullshit" engraved on them and an escape helicopter would help, too.
Every time I read about scumbags like this, I'm more and more convinced that this is indeed the only way.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
Double edged sword. It can take decades of time and millions upon millions to spit out one thing useful. Patents give return on investment.
I'd love research done for research's sake too, but pragmatism has this nasty habit of beating the snot out of idealism.
However...
Besides, if you didn't invent it, screw off.
Damn right. StemCells needs to be staplegunned to the wall for this crap...as well as the Patent Office being held liable too, since someone didn't do their prior art research.
The article doesn't say whether the original inventors published. If a technique can't be found in a literature search, I'd be surprised if it's considered prior art.
If the original inventors try to win on the grounds of priority, didn't it change a while ago from first-to-invent to first-to-file?
When someone develops a technology, their choices are generally to patent it themselves, publish it to give it to the public, or keep the development a secret. If a company indeed developed the technology independently, and there was no making the knowledge public, then the secret-keeper can have a problem. The patent system encourages developments to be made public, but with benefits for doing so. One of the detriments is that if you keep a secret, you may find someone else decides to patent it. Then you are can be an infringer. This is a rarer instance. Most often in the not-for-profit world, people choose to publish. In fact, early publication is the biggest threat to universities getting patents on professors' developments.
He didn't assume it, he asked about it.
And may have been thinking about the 271(e)(1) exemption or "Hatch-Waxman exemption".
I don't see any proof of that in the article. The article implies that it was lack of initiative by Salk Institute that allowed StemCells to secure a patent on the technique: "The dispute comes down to access to a technique that Schwartz helped develop at the Salk Institute but the institute failed to patent. StemCells did." Can you provide a citation that gives a detailed chronology? In any case, Weissman comes off as a huge hypocrite by freezing out a research group with no commercial interests --- i.e., on the one hand he'll advocate for freedom to carry out this research, while simultaneously stymieing basic, non-commercial research with the other. This is what really bothers me about patents: They can enable commercial interests to erect a fence and keep out any public research in a potentially large area of science. Commercial interests can often secure funds to pay for licensing the patents. This usually is not in the budget for publicly funded research groups. (My preview shows this appearing as a wall of text, even though I have included white space.)
Executive summery, fourth paragraph:
"We have over forty issued U.S. patents, plus foreign equivalents to some fourteen of our U.S. patents and applications, for a total of over one hundred and seventy individual patents worldwide."
This company is clearly a patent troll, NOT a technology company. Shame shame shame.
The word you're looking for is "afoul". Though you did conjure up an interesting image.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The point of patents is that if you come up with something cool, the patent protects your ability to make a living off of having done so both through marketing it yourself and through licensing it to others.
It doesn't often work that way in practice. Patents are used to prevent competition instead of encouraging it, and licensing fees are used to determine who can and who cannot practically work with the technology. It's yet another case where the basic idea was sound but the implementation is lacking. A major issue has been that the scientific and corporate landscape has changed significantly over time, while the patent system has not adapted adequately.
I used to think statements like this were hyperbole but now it seems an unavoidable conclusion. There was a time when America, and "the West" in general, were animated by a respect for science in and of itself.
Now there is something deeply broken in our country, it's as if there has been a kind of fundamental rejection of the concept of progress as one of the central aspects of our national identity. The idea that together we can make the future better than the present has seemingly been supplanted by authoritarian greediness. Americans don't generally believe in improving the world, we have rejected the idea of the "common good".
The American project was founded on Enlightenment values, somewhere along the way we lost sight of those values and have drifted from their moral trajectory into a dystopia.
Which is all well and fine, but in the meantime research is put on hold and the fraudsters (let's be blunt, that's what these guys are) may lose the patent but will suffer nothing else from what amounts to the IP equivalent of forging bad checks. This company is hardly the first. Probably the most famous patent con artists were Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, both of which have, ironically, come to represent the towering achievers of the modern patent system.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This happens a lot. The sticking point is often that the patent owner offers the research lab a license to use their technology, but the lab has to sign an agreement to turn over the rights to all the commercially useful results of the lab's research to the patent holder. Often the agreement is so onerous, the researchers refuse to sign.
With the BRCA gene patent that was recently overturned, the lab could do research with the BRCA test for free, but if they found out one of their subjects was positive for the BRCA gene, they weren't allowed to tell the subject, because Myriad Genetics was charging $3,000 per test.
As to the prior art -- I thought the same thing. Academic scientists always publish anything useful, and if it was published, it would be prior art.
You can find the actual patent numbers in their 10-K form if anybody wants to look it up. http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9Mzc2ODQxfENoaWxkSUQ9Mzc1NTU2fFR5cGU9MQ==&t=1
I wonder how much of this research was done with U.S. government funding, which would have made it unpatentable until the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980.
Actually when filing for the patent StemCells should have had to prove originality of their idea. If their patent is found invalidated hopefully they will be forced to compensate for legal fees, but since many of these companies are small shell companies made to collect profit and compartmentalize risk they will have just enough assets for whatever their purpose is and no more so wont be able to pay any thing to the courts if they loose the case.
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
and we are very much part of 'the western world'. Right there next to you. A little to the north. There you go.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
How patently fair. The intellectual property laws are out there for everyone to see and play by, and the public has benefited from this.
The process was apparently invented independently and simultaneously by two groups, only one of which (StemCells) filed a patent for it. If Schwartz had merely published his work first (or filed a patent for it first, which is tantamount to publishing), he could have blocked StemCell from obtaining a patent.
Schwartz chose instead to keep his technology secret. He lost his bet that no one else would discover the same thing any time soon. Thanks to StemCell's patent application, everyone now knows about the technology, rather than just Schwartz. People worldwide can now build on that technology, either through licensing of it or by trying to find work-arounds.
This may seem obvioud to you and me, but many people don't get it. Stem cell research has the potential to CURE many medical problems. That's CURE, as in permanently fix them. Most of "Big Pharma" makes most of their revenue from the boat load of maintenance medications that they ship out every day to TREAT THE SYMPTOMS of the many "chronic" and "incurable" diseases that are out there. My dad has taken a handful of pills every day of his life for the last 20 years to keep the prostate cancer that he got those two decades ago from coming back. Would have been a lot cheaper for him to have taken just a few magic blue pills to cure it once by straightening out the genes that make him have it in the first place. Same goes for AIDS / HIV patients. I've seen the cup fulls of pills they go through on a day to day basis to stay "healthy" or at least postpone the inevitable. If they found a way to kill or render ineffective HIV, then how much revenue would drug makers loose practically overnight?
There is NO LONG TERM MONEY to be made for drug companies in curing diseases. There IS a public health benifit to it though. Once governments see past their own politician's greed for being lobbied by these companies and start to promote university research at curing these diseases while being free of BS lawsuits like this impacting their work, medicine will stay where it has been for the last two decades, stagnated.
It cannot really be fixed.
1) The assesor of the value of a patent have an interest to accept any patents because it makes money for them
2) the non profit loophole is useless, because the non profit entity could not do anything with the results, not even give it away for free, the only thing they could do is to give it to the "holder(s)"
moreover defining what is non profit and for profit is in practice impossible
3) in all case the guy with much money for it's lawyers and nothing to looses wins (i.e. patent trolls)
to make the system "kind of work", you would need to have the patent organisations do two things
-1) garanty with their own money the validity of the patent (so if they misses some prior art they are punished), and the damage they might be paying should be put immediatly in escrow
to make sure that they cannot just try to wiggle out of it.
-2) It should define an uniform licence price that apply to all, so that the usage of the patented tech is anonymous (otherwise the patent holder has a free market research based on it's competitors numbers)
then another entity should be managing the payments of the IP.
This would limit the most horrible issues of patents, but it would still pour concrete in the wheels and make research and dev. much more expensive than it needs to be.
So: repeat after me: patents are bad...
Oh, yeah, because after choosing to kill a bunch of people (well, assholes, but still) really I would totally be stopped by the fact that my specific preferred gun type is outlawed in the area where killing must take place.
Yes judge, I killed these 20 motherfuckers with an illegal weapon. I was going to kill them with a legal one, but decided to be an outlaw instead.
You can't handle the truth.
and the public has benefited from this.
Bullshit. The method was easy enough that multiple people have independently discovered it and it is now locked down so that nobody else can use it, at least without paying a worthless person who didn't even invent anything.
A simple, usable method for something was easily available and in use, now it is not. The public lost, and big.
People worldwide can now build on that technology, either through licensing of it or by trying to find work-arounds.
What kind of retard are you that you think it's going to be easier? The easy method is now taken, to work-around it they're going to have to needlessly complicate what should be a simple task. Pre-patent they'd have just looked in the lit, found who was doing it and asked him to explain his technique.
Patents should automatically be voided if anyone ever (before or after) independently invents the same thing.
I saw a similar story (though of a much smaller scale). A tow-truck towed the wrong car, badly, and then abandoned it ruined on the side of the road when the error was discovered. By the time the owner found their vehicle a few hours later the towing company was dissolved. When the show investigated the owner had had many such companies.
This is why I advocate removing the so-called corporate veil. I feel that unless you actively pursue honest dealings in your company (forward all transactions to auditors, audit processes for holes, etc) that you should go down with the company if it's found to have committed a crime. All the way up to the shareholders. Investing in a company not sufficiently open for you to be sure it's really clean should get you in trouble if it's not, like buying a TV for a too-good-to-be-true price.
If these patent trolls were unwound after failure and traced back to their owners, which were similarly unwound, all the way to the people who ordered their illegal actions I wouldn't have half the problem with patents that I do.