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Cash payments and other arrangements between patent holders and their competitors in exchange for a delayed market entry interfere with free-market principles and keep product prices at a premium, which affects payers, governments, healthcare providers and especially patients.
Knowledge-sharing strategies differ depending on the nature of the research objectives of public–private partnerships, but information about such strategies is often vague.
What have we learned from 20 tumultuous years of patent law in the life sciences? Is patenting likely to be as important for the industry in the future?
The development of patent-specific educational resources and prompt resolution of patentability rules unsettled by recent US Supreme Court decisions are urgently needed in the genomics industry.
Although China has in the past decade been reluctant to grant patents on human embryonic stem cell technology, it has recently changed its patent policy to loosen some restrictions.
The restructuring of the crop agriculture industry over the past two decades has enabled patent holders to exclude, prevent and deter others from using certain research tools and delay or block further follow-on inventions.
The uses of genetic sequences to inform, enable or create products or services for human biomedicine are substantially different from their uses in crop-based agriculture.
The courts' new approach not only puts the US biotech industry at a competitive disadvantage but also misapprehends the nature of innovation in biotech.