Posts Tagged: "antibiotic resistance"

Public Health and Bioscientific War on Superbugs is Hobbled by IP Uncertainties

How will our patent system treat this wonderful new discovery? How long will it take before its curative benefits can be deployed ? We can only hope that DC’s meddlers in our innovation ecosystem read the Ms. Sun’s article. Because however fervently the medical and scientific communities respond to this growing superbug crisis, IP’s DC government legal eagles are either unaware or unconcerned. The USPTO is regularly rejecting microbial patent applications in blind servitude to Alice-Mayo’s confusing eligibility formula. We can hope, but cannot be assured, the Federal Circuit will make sense some day of Alice-Mayo’s two-step test. But when? Worse, it appears that SCOTUS is infected by the anti-patent poison infesting our Capitol. How refreshing it would be to have our Congress and the nation’s highest Court be as concerned with superbugs as they seem to be with PR-created patent trolls.

The superbugs are here, but where are we?

Superbugs have powerful friends in high places. SCOTUS’s patent eligibility criteria emanating from Mayo/Alice’s mysterious “laws of nature” and credible reports of unremitting turndowns by USPTO applicants portend hard times commercializing much of this research, which means its development and testing may never make it to licensed distribution. In Congress, deficit scolds roll back much needed NIH funding while solons clamor for more military weapons that have long outlived their usefulness. Even sexy pandemics like Ebola, Pan Asian Flu, and Zika and competing with Biden moonshots and precision medicine initiatives are forced to forage for the fiscal nourishment they need to compete and commercialize their critical research.