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Authored by: frederik on Thursday, June 13 2013 @ 03:21 PM EDT |
The point of the patent (for patent holder) is to exclude others to maximize
profits for self.
With BRCA1 as an example, the sequence has an exact specification about 5,500
nucleotides long. I could make a PCR test to extract the segment with a given
common mutation with two exactly specified 15-nucleotide primers. A patent for
that would be useless, since someone else can do it with another pair of
15-nucleotide primers in slightly different locations. Or 16-nucleotide primers.
Not useful for exclusion(*).
So, instead the patent aims to cover *any* [pair] of primers, 15 nucleotides or
longer from the BRCA1 [cDNA] sequence. That does exclude others from building
the test.
My point is that this is overbroad, not only because it covers sequences
naturally occurring in BRCA1 [court decision], but also because it covers many
sequences in other genes including genes previously patented by others
("prior art" [admittedly laughable].)
(*) PCR works because you use a pair of primers. Even if each primers also
matches elsewhere, it works as long as they do not both match elsewhere in close
proximity to each other. However, in the set of all possible BRCA1 sequence
primer pairs there will be some that amplify a segment of a completely
different, in some cases already patented, gene.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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