Tag: patent pools

Bill of Health - Globe and vaccine, covid vaccine

Promoting Vaccine Equity

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Ana Santos Rutschman

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief longstanding equity problems surrounding the allocation of newly developed vaccines against emerging pathogens.

In my upcoming book, Vaccines as Technology: Innovation, Barriers, and the Public Health, I examine these problems and look into possible solutions to incrementally build more equitable frameworks of access to vaccines targeting emerging pathogens. These solutions focus on ensuring that vaccines are made available affordably to the populations that need them the most according to public health parameters.

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Opportunities and challenges for user-generated licensing models in gene-editing

Timo Minssen Leave a comment

By Timo Minssen,  Esther van Zimmeren & Jakob Wested 

An earlier version of this contribution had been published in Life Science Intellectual Property Review (LSIPR).

A voluntary pool or clearinghouse model may give rise to a robust commercial ecosystem for CRISPR and could include special provisions for royalty-free research use by academics. Hence, there may be a path through the CRISPR patent jungle. But, there are many obstacles still in the way.

The revocation of Broad Institute’s patent EP2771468 reported and discussed here, marks the latest major development in a series of patent battles over the revolutionary and highly lucrative CRISPR-Cas9 technology (and other gene editing technologies) in the US and Europe.

While this is the first EPO decision in an opposition procedure concerning the Broad patent portfolio, the outcome may have implications for other related patents as the rationale for the revocation reflects a larger, systemic challenge based on the different rules regarding priority claims in different jurisdictions.

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