WIPO’s Budapest Treaty facilitates biotech patenting

In the medical field, microorganisms are used to produce a host of life-saving therapies – antibiotics, vaccines, insulin – and diagnostic tools; in agriculture, they are used in developing high-yielding, resistant crop varieties. They are also used in environmental waste management systems and a host of industrial applications, including the production of green fuels like ethanol. These tiny organisms have huge potential to improve the quality of our lives and the environment in which we live, and to reduce our carbon footprint.

For many, biotechnology holds the key to overcoming some of the daunting challenges facing humanity in the 21st century.

Developing these groundbreaking applications takes a massive investment of time, energy and resources. It is a high-risk research undertaking, and successful innovations can be imitated at little cost. As such, researchers and the biotech companies that employ them rely heavily on the intellectual property system, especially patents, to protect their know-how and maximize the chances of getting a return on their investment.

Criteria for patent protection

Applicants seeking patent protection in all fields of technology are required to satisfy certain criteria as set out in national patent law. Typically, to qualify for patent protection an invention must be novel, non-obvious to a specialist working in the relevant field and must have some industrial application or utility. Within the patent application process, there is what is known as a disclosure requirement whereby applicants must describe how their invention works. The description must be sufficiently detailed for a specialist in the field to be able to put the invention into practice – the enablement requirement.

These requirements are an important part of the social bargain that underpins the patenting process. An applicant receives the protection conferred by a patent and in return publicly discloses details of his or her invention so that others may improve upon it and develop a better technology, and thereby push the frontiers of technological development. This patent-related information is stored in powerful databases such as WIPO’s PATENTSCOPE, the world’s largest publicly available patent database which currently hosts over 47 million patent applications, and use of which is free of charge.

How biotech patenting is different

For many technologies, a written description is enough to enable a specialist working in the relevant field to reproduce an invention for which patent protection is sought. When it comes...