Category: Biotechnology

Petrie-Flom Interns’ Weekly Round-Up, 2/14-2/21

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By Chloe Reichel

1) Belgium’s recent vote to legalize euthanasia for children has drawn international debate and criticism. The law would allow terminally ill children to end their lives, provided that they have parental consent.

2) Lawmakers in California have proposed adding a warning label on soda and juice that has sugar added and over 75 calories per 12 ounces. The labels would warn against the health risks associated with consuming sugary beverages.

3) The Food and Drug Administration announced today that it will hold a meeting on the topic of changing the over-the-counter monograph system. Currently, the processes of publishing and changing a monograph are very time consuming.

4) Monsanto is producing new strains of vegetables without using GMOs. Instead, they are selectively crossbreeding different varieties of plants.

5) A recent study conducted by a group at Stanford University released findings that seriously injured patients with insurance are less likely to be transferred to trauma centers than uninsured patients. The group hypothesized that this difference in trauma care can be explained by the fact that non-trauma center hospitals have a financial incentive to keep insured patients under their care.

6) The sale and use of electronic cigarettes will be regulated in Beverly Hills, as decided by the Beverly Hills City Council earlier this week. Los Angeles passed similar legislation this December.

7) Enrollment in health insurance plans for one fifth of people who have registered under the Affordable Care Act was not completed, due to their failure to pay the first premium. Some insurers have granted more time for subscribers to pay their premiums.

8) Wendy Davis recently said that she would support restricting abortion access to the first twenty weeks of pregnancy, but filibustered last year against a bill containing that provision because of the wording of the bill and the other restrictions included within it.

Disclosing Genetic Risks: Lessons from the Philosophy of Language

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By Michael J. Young

Earlier this month, landmark findings were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry illuminating the effect of disclosing genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease on older adults’ cognition and memory.  In a case-control study, researchers administered memory function tests to a group of known carriers of the apolipoprotein E4 allele (one of the best studied genetic risk factors for developing Alzheimer’s disease), half of whom were informed of their carrier status, and half of whom were not informed of their carrier status.  They reported “[s]ignificant genotype-by-disclosure interaction effects were observed on several memory rating scales and tests of immediate and delayed verbal recall. Older adults who knew their ε4+ genotype judged their memory more harshly and performed worse on an objective verbal memory test than did ε4+ adults who did not know. In contrast, older adults who knew their ε4− genotype judged their memory more positively than did ε4− adults who did not know…informing older adults that they have an APOE genotype associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease can have adverse consequences on their perception of their memory abilities and on their performance on objective memory tests. Similar consequences might be expected if other indices of an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease are disclosed (e.g., neuroimaging or CSF biomarkers of preclinical Alzheimer’s disease.)”

These findings raise profound questions for practitioners who must make regular decisions concerning how to communicate health risk information to patients, and more fundamentally, about what principles and policies ought to govern which findings should be disclosed or disguised.

The study and its implications bear striking correlates to a set of key issues in philosophy of language relating to the meta-descriptive aspects of speech and discourse.  In a series of lectures later published as How We Do Things with Words, philosopher J.L. Austin persuasively argued against a longstanding philosophical tradition that had conceptualized language as a construct that exists solely to describe reality as it is or is imagined to be; Austin reasoned that language can serve not only to describe facts but can also serve to establish new facts by representing them as such.

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Public Lecture at Radcliffe Institute “The Ethicist’s and The Lawyer’s New Clothes: The Law and the Ethics of Smart Clothes” now Available on Youtube

I. Glenn Cohen 1 Comment

As part of a public lecture series at the Radcliffe Institute on “Smart Clothes” I delivered a public lecture entitled “The Ethicist’s and the Lawyer’s New Clothes: The Law and Ethics of Smart Clothes.” The lecture is now available for viewing on youtube. As the promotional materials described the lecture: “From enhanced exosuits for members of the armed services to clothing that spies on you, I. Glenn Cohen focuses on legal and ethical issues pertaining to the future of smart clothes.” While CNN coverage of the lecture focused on the surveillance aspects of these clothes, I think the discussion of exosuits and enhancements may be more interesting to BOH readers.

Patent trolls/Monetizers/PAEs/NPEs and Bio/Pharma

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By Nicholson Price

There’s recently been a lot of focus on patent trolls (so called by those who dislike them; they’re also known as patent assertion entities, nonpracticing entities, and monetizers, each with slightly different definitions; I describe them a bit more after the fold*): there have been Congressional hearings, a bill passed in the House, White House statements, state legislation, and quite a bit of academic attention.  Most attention, though, assumes this is mostly an issue for the high-tech and software industries; in particular, it’s usually assumed that the biotech and pharmaceutical industries are insulated from the phenomenon.  Robin Feldman (at UC Hastings) and I decided to reexamine that assumption, and argue in this piece that the conventional wisdom is wrong, and that biopharma is a relevant target for monetizers.

The basic argument of our piece is as follows: conventional wisdom holds that pharma need not worry about monetizers: even though patents are very important for drug companies, each drug is usually covered by just one or a few patents, and the company either owns them or has licensed them; otherwise it wouldn’t make the drug.  So there just aren’t patents out there that can be asserted; ergo, no monetizer problem.  And indeed, there hasn’t been much action so far.  We point to three challenges to this wisdom: (1) regulatory oversight increases the costs of inventing-around an asserted patent; (2) monetizers are spreading past low-hanging fruit; and (3) the business of selling drugs involves much more than just coming up with an active chemical compound, so that “much more” is still vulnerable to monetizers.  But the main thrust of the paper is against the assumption that there aren’t assertable patents out there.

We thought the patent holdings of universities would likely include lots of patents that might be used by monetizers against pharma, and we were right.  In a deliberately light skim across patent holdings of 5 major research university systems, we easily found many such patents.  The paper describes multiple different categories of patents that could be used, and provides examples of each.  We didn’t aim to be exhaustive, just to point out that the issue is a relevant one to biopharma (whatever you think of trolls), and that that industry should be taken into account–and should participate–in the policy debates about what happens next.  Read More

New paper on “Standardization, IPRs and Open Innovation in Synthetic Biology”

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By Timo Minssen

I am pleased to announce that we have today published the following paper:

Minssen, Timo and Wested, Jakob Blak, Standardization, IPRs and Open Innovation in Synthetic Biology (February 14, 2014). Available at SSRN.

This brief book contribution stems from a presentation given at the 2013 conference “Innovation, Competition, Collaboration” at Bucerius Law School, Hamburg, Germany. It is currently under review by Edward Elgar.  A longer journal-version will follow.

Abstract: 

An effective and just sharing of resources for innovation needs a supportive infrastructure. One such infrastructure of both historic and contemporary significance is the development of standards. Considering recent developments within the software and ICT industries, it seems fair to assume that the process of standardization may also have significant impact on the development and adoption of Synthetic Biology (SB). Within SB different standardization efforts have been made, but few have assumed dominance or authority. Standardization efforts within SB may differ within various technical areas, and also the basic processes of standard creation can be divided into various categories. The different technical areas and processes for standardization differ in their speed, handling of interests and ability to dodge possible IPR concerns.

Out of this notion arises i.a. the following questions: How comparable is engineering in SB to more traditional fields of engineering?; What type of standards have emerged and what bearing have IPRs on these?; and, How applicable are the approaches adopted by the standards-setting organizations in the information and communication technology (ICT) to biological standards? These and further legal issues related to IP, regulation, standardization, competition law & open innovation require a careful consideration of new user-generated models and solutions.

Before this background, our paper seeks to describe IP and standardization aspects of SB in order to discuss them in the context of the “open innovation” discourse. We concentrate on describing the technology and identifying areas of particular relevance. Ultimately we also sketch out open questions and potential solutions requiring further research. However, due to the limitation of this paper we do not aim to create elaborated theories or to propose solutions in more detail. Rather this paper, which will be complemented by more extensive follow-up studies, provides a first overview on the complex questions that we are currently dealing with.

To achieve this modest goal, section 1 commences with a brief introduction to the fascinating science of SB and a description of recent technological advances and applications. This will lead us to section 2, in which we will address standard setting efforts in SB, as well as the relevance and governance of various IPRs for specific SB standards. This provides the basis for section 3, in which we debate problematic issues and summarize our conclusions.

2/27: Frances Kamm’s Bioethical Prescriptions: Book Talk and Panel Discussion

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Please join us on February 27 at 2:00pm in Wasserstein 1019 at the Harvard Law School as we launch Professor Frances Kamm’s latest book, Bioethical Prescriptions: To Create, End, Choose, and Improve Lives (Oxford University Press, January 2014). The book showcases Professor Kamm’s articles on bioethics as parts of a coherent whole, with sections devoted to death and dying; early life (on conception and use of embryos, abortion, and childhood); genetics and other enhancements (on cloning and other genetic technologies); allocating scarce resources; and methodology (on the relation of moral theory and practical ethics).

Panelists include:

  • Frances Kamm, Littauer Professor of Philosophy & Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School of Government; Professor of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Harvard University; Former Senior Fellow, Petrie-Flom Center
  • Norman Daniels, Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics and Professor of Ethics and Population Health, Harvard School of Public Health
  • Thomas (Tim) Scanlon, Jr., Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Harvard University
  • Moderator: Christopher T. Robertson, Visiting Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Associate Professor, James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona

This event is free and open to the public. For questions, please contact petrie-flom@law.harvard.edu or 617-496-4662.

Sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics; Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University; and the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; with support from the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund.

Are We Misusing the “Brain Death” Diagnosis to Hurry Along Families?

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Cross-posted from HealthLawProf Blog. Originally posted January 20, 2014.

What are We Learning About Brain Death from the McMath and Munoz cases?

By Jennifer S. Bard, J.D., M.P.H., Ph.D.

With the understanding that this is one of those topics that health law professors are supposed to know something about, here is a quick update of what’s going on.  Along with my own views about the possible misuse by hospitals of declaring brain death in what are really medical futility cases.

Jahi McMath, age 12, in California who lost consciousness after a routine tonsillectomy and Marlize Munoz, age 32  in Texas who collapsed on her kitchen floor have both become involuntary public figures as their families struggle to make sense of both their medical conditions, which are complex, and of the laws which have declared them both legally dead based on a lack of brain activity.  In legal terms, a person declared “brain dead” has the same status as any other dead person.  Each state is entitled to make its own decision of whether or not to adopt a brain death statute.  California’s and Texas’ are similar in that they require the “complete cessation” of all brain activity.  The declaration of death is, in all states, a legal act.  Most hospitals have a policy similar to this one which set criteria and require the participation of at least two doctors.  A declaration of death cuts off any rights of the individual.  The family of someone declared dead is no longer a surrogate decision maker.  Rather, they have something like property rights to the disposal of the remains.    More pointedly, a declaration of death ends all eligibility for medical insurance, including Medicaid and Medicare.  If a family decides to release the organs for donation, their host becomes not a patient but rather a “heart beating organ donor.” 

When a family wants to donate their loved one’s organs, a declaration of brain death is helpful mechanism for doing so.  Indeed, a series of high profile cases involving anencephalic infants in the 1990s pointed out the frustrations of parents who wanted to donate their children’s organs but could not because they retained minimal brain function.  However, there is never any legal need  for a declaration of brain death in order for a family to withdraw life sustaining treatment.  In 1993 bioethicist Robert Veatch wrote an important article in the Hastings Center Report in which he pointed out that “no one really believes that literally all functions of the entire brain must be lost for an individual to be dead.”  And indeed, no one really believes that a piece of paper converts a warm, breathing body from alive to dead.

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Petrie-Flom Interns’ Weekly Round-Up, 1/31-2/7

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Chloe Reichel

1) On February 11, the FDA will launch its “Real Cost,” anti-smoking campaign. The $115-million campaign is geared toward discouraging teenagers from smoking by emphasizing the “personally relevant” effects of smoking.

2) Lawsuits against the manufacturer of Pradaxa, Boehringer Ingelheim, have revealed internal documents about the dangers of the drug. The drug, a blood thinner, has been associated with over 1,000 deaths.

3) By October 2014, CVS will no longer sell tobacco products. CVS has decided to implement this ban because, increasingly they see their role as providing health care, and tobacco products cause negative health effects.

4) Naxolone, a drug that is used to reverse the effects of opiate overdoses, is now available to patients in California through their doctors. Prior to the creation of this law, the drug was much less widely available–primarily it was administered in emergency rooms.

5) Following the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, between 1 to 2 million Americans have enrolled in Medicaid. A study from Avalere Health states that this number increased only partially because of the ACA.

6) This Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration released regulations to guarantee that infant formula is safe for consumption. The regulations stipulate that certain nutrients are included in the product, and require tests for pathogens.