A new online resource project aims to provide a free and multilayered global database of patented intellectual property in the life sciences.

Supported by $3 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Initiative for Open Innovation (IOI) is the brainchild of Australia-based Richard Jefferson, who in 1991 founded the Cambia organization to give developing countries access to the tools of molecular biology.

“The IOI is really not about patents, it's about innovation, transparency and decision support—patents are the entry point,” Jefferson says.“Patents are a brilliant resource, but only when there is clarity and transparency in the system, which are now lacking,” he adds.

Launched in July at a UN conference in Geneva, the IOI is also supported by the Oregon-based Lemenson Foundation and Brisbane's Queensland University of Technology.

Further backing has come from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), whose director, Australian Francis Gurry, is a member of the IOI's International Advisory Council, which met for the first time in August. “This initiative is very timely, as the international policy community is undertaking an active process of review and examination of innovation structures and strategies in a range of key technology domains,” Gurry says.

Other advisory council members include David Lipman, director of the US National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health, Tan Tieniu, deputy secretary general of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Malebona Matsoso, director of Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property at the World Health Organization. Nature's editor-in-chief, Philip Campbell, is also a member.

The IOI will build on Cambia's Patent Lens project, which now provides a free database of more than 77 million DNA and protein sequences disclosed in patents. Patent Lens (http://www.patentlens.net), which turns up more than 9,000 search results for the breast cancer gene BRCA1, will be integrated into the IOI as its core informatics platform.

Initially focused on the life sciences with priority given to influenza, malaria and tuberculosis, the IOI will provide a searchable patent database across sectors, disciplines and jurisdictions in all major languages. It will include the full text of patents and applications, associated DNA, protein sequences and chemical structures, with dynamic links to associated business and regulatory data, and scientific and technical literature.

This cross-referenced online facility will be a key point of differentiation from existing free and proprietary patent search services, which, apart from the WIPO, are also generally country-specific and single language. “Public sector scientists rarely read the patent literature and even more rarely have the technical facility to understand the meaning of patents in their context and in the innovation trajectory to which their work contributes,” Jefferson says.

A strategic plan is due for endorsement by the IOI's advisory panel by the end of this year, and features of the project supported by the Gates Foundation grant will begin to appear in the middle of next year.