Shedding Light on the Life Sciences: Patent Landscaping for Public Policymakers
| Author | Antony Taubman |
| Position | Acting Director and Head, Global IP Issues Division Acknowledgement Anja Von der Ropp, Associate Officer, Life Sciences and Public Policy Section |
The Life sciences offer tremendous promise for humanity - new medicines, better crops, a cleaner environment -while at the same time fuelling debates over such diverse questions as bioethics, access to medicines, food security, custodianship of the environment - even the very genetic identity of humanity. It is not, therefore, surprising that policymakers, consumers, industry bodies and others scrutinize developments in the life sciences closely and demand good quality, accessible information as the basis for effective regulation and sound policy decisions.
Patents offer pathways for generating, disseminating and implementing valuable new technologies for greater public welfare. But life sciences patents have been a source of controversy - consider recent debates concerning patents for stem cells, diagnostic tools and rice genes; or questions about the impact of patents on access to medicines and on transfer of environmentally friendly technology.
An essential function of the patent system is to deliver information to the public: informing the public is not an incidental benefit of the patent process but is built, by design, into the very foundations of the system. The patent system discloses:
Legal information, including published details of what material is patented, with what legal scope, in what countries, in whose name, and when it passes into the public domain;
Technological information, such as a patent's so-called 'teaching' or technical disclosure, which is required to give a skilled reader all the information needed to put the new technology into practical effect.
Both of these aspects are important to life sciences policymakers, who are concerned not only with the substance of emerging technologies, but also with who holds exclusive rights over technologies, where and for how long.
This 'disclosure' in the past produced vast libraries of printed documents, which were costly and laborious to use effectively. Recent advances in information technology and broader Internet access mean that patent information is now much more readily available. Obviously, many important life sciences technologies are not published in patent documents. But the in-principle transparency of the patent system and greater practical accessibility make patent data a valuable resource for policymakers and analysts concerned with life sciences issues -for the content of patent documents, and increasingly for the guidance that can be extracted from collections of patent documents - not just point-by-point technical analysis but the prospect of reviewing the technology landscape.
A patent landscape is an overview of patenting activity in a field of technology. A...
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