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Biotech / Medical : VD's Model Portfolio & Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: poodle who wrote (4858)	5/11/1998 4:21:00 AM
From: Rocketman	Respond to of 9719

My bet on ESTs is that they will be patentable as exact sequences only ie.) if you have another EST that is only slightly different, such as going to the next restriction site, or maybe even as small as a base pair difference that it could maybe be a way to engineer around the EST. Having the EST patented I doubt will allow you to claim a gene that has the EST as a part of it. An analogous situation is in Copyrights, just because someone used the word "and" in a copywrited document once doesn't mean that no one else can use the word. Now when you get to a fairly large piece that does have meaning such a sentence or a paragraph, then that is protected. This all still needs to be resolved and as usual the patent office seems in no hurry to make a decision. I figure in another decade or so they'll get around to clarifying the situation and then everyone can sue everyone else for what happened 10 or 20 years ago, and then the courts will really resolve the issue in another 10 years or so. Then they'll finally issue the patents 10 or 20 years after they've expired, and you can go back and try and collect retroactive royalties. From a patent standpoint, it is the full genes that matter. And, how about polymorphisms? If you have one that only has a single base pair difference, but it changes the protein slightly, then it seems to me that it would be a unique gene that should be patentable even though they are 99.999% the same. However, if you have one that just changes the codon to a redundant codon and the protein is uneffected that it would not be patentable. Only time will tell.......... Rman