Richard, curious as to where you got the information on the patent application. The USPTO web site says that patent application data is confidential.
I wonder about the patentability of the procedure. Sykes, et al. can't patent bone marrow transplants, they are known. And they can't patent organ transplants, they, too, are known. They can't patent doing both at the same time if the procedures are medically indicated, as that would be obvious. The only thing they can patent is doing them at the same time for the purpose of making the recipient not reject the host organ, when the bone marrow transplant isn't otherwise needed, which could probably be patented, although enforcement seems problematic, BWDIK?
What I heard on NPR was that they aren't planning on using the procedure for that purpose yet.
I don't know about the relative risk ratios of bone marrow transplants vs. immunosuppressive drugs.
But I am sure that on NPR they said this would only work with closely matched donors of bone marrow, in the case they were talking about on NPR, a sister.
How often is it that an organ donor is closely matched? I think usually just for kidneys and bone marrow, right?
Edit: just searched "mixed chimerism" on PubMed, 437 entries, so even that's going to be hard to patent. |
