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Intellectual property rights in publicly funded biobanks: much ado about nothing?

Should biobanks be involved in downstream intellectual property rights developed from accessing materials contained in them, and to what extent?

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Figure 1: IPRs developed in the context of biobanks.
Figure 2: Innovation cycle in publicly funded biobanks.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the Public Population Project in Genomics (P3G) (which is hosted by the University of Montreal and financially supported by Genome Canada and Genome Quebec).

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Correspondence to Saminda Pathmasiri.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Pathmasiri, S., Deschênes, M., Joly, Y. et al. Intellectual property rights in publicly funded biobanks: much ado about nothing?. Nat Biotechnol 29, 319–323 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.1834

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