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Published online 10 October 2007 | Nature 449, 651 (2007) | doi:10.1038/449651a
News: Business
Patent crunch pending
Drug makers are fighting a rear-guard action against patent laws that are before the US Congress. Meredith Wadman reports.
The biotechnology firm Alkermes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has made a big bet on a simple idea: that patients with diabetes should be able to inhale, rather than inject, their insulin. Since the method was first described in 1997 (D.
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Innovators in the IT industry have problems with this bill, too. Genuine advances are usually made by small firms and individuals. The bill in its present form makes it easier for large firms to "engineer around" new patents, to gain leverage in contesting them, and to license them on favorable terms. The problem of "patent trolls" can and should be addressed by more narrowly tailored legislation that does not make life cozy for incumbent IT giants by removing the incentive for younger rivals to invent tomorrow's technologies.