Open Source Biotechnology

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URL = http://rsss.anu.edu.au/~janeth/


Definition

"Open Source licensing is a style of intellectual property management that has evolved in the past half-decade out of the Free Software movement, initiated in the early 1980s in response to restrictive copyright licensing practices adopted by commercial software developers. The Open Source approach seeks to preserve ongoing community access to proprietary software tools without precluding or discouraging commercial involvement in their development.

"Open Source Biotechnology" refers to the possibility of extending the principles of commerce-friendly, commons-based peer production exemplified by Open Source software development to the development of research tools in biomedical and agricultural biotechnology." (http://rsss.anu.edu.au/~janeth/)


Citations

Open Source Biotechnology, from The Economist

“open-source approaches have emerged in biotechnology already. The international effort to sequence the human genome, for instance, resembled an open-source initiative. It placed all the resulting data into the public domain rather than allow any participant to patent any of the results. Open source is also flourishing in bioinformatics, the field in which biology meets information technology. This involves performing biological research using supercomputers rather than test-tubes. Within the bioinformatics community, software code and databases are often swapped on “you share, I share" terms, for the greater good of all. Evidently the open-source approach works in biological-research tools and pre-competitive platform technologies. The question now is whether it will work further downstream, closer to the patient, where the development costs are greater and the potential benefits more direct. Open-source research could indeed, it seems, open up two areas in particular. The first is that of non-patentable compounds and drugs whose patents have expired. These receive very little attention from researchers, because there would be no way to protect (and so profit from) any discovery that was made about their effectiveness. To give an oft-quoted example, if aspirin cured cancer, no company would bother to do the trials to prove it, or go through the rigmarole of regulatory approval, since it could not patent the discovery. (In fact, it might be possible to apply for a process patent that covers a new method of treatment, but the broader point still stands.) Lots of potentially useful drugs could be sitting under researchers' noses.

The second area where open source might be able to help would be in developing treatments for diseases that afflict small numbers of people, such as Parkinson's disease, or are found mainly in poor countries, such as malaria. In such cases, there simply is not a large enough market of paying customers to justify the enormous expense of developing a new drug. America's Orphan Drug Act, which provides financial incentives to develop drugs for small numbers of patients, is one approach. But there is still plenty of room for improvement—which is where the open-source approach might have a valuable role to play."(http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2724420)


Examples

Open Source Biotechnology in Agriculture

"Researchers in Australia have devised a method of creating genetically modified crops that does not infringe on patents held by big biotechnology companies. The technique will be made available free to others to use and improve, as long as any improvements are also available free." (http://business-times.asia1.com.sg/sub/views/story/0,4574,144880,00.html)


More Information

See the entry on Open Biology

PhD thesis by Janet Hope dowloadable at http://rsss.anu.edu.au/~janeth/OpenSourceBiotechnology27July2005.pdf

Chapter on OS biology is at http://rsss.anu.edu.au/~janeth/OSBiotech.html