Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Policy changes are needed to ensure that Cooperative Research and Development Agreements and patent applications filed by the US National Institutes of Health are aligned with the interests of the American public.
Novel beneficial traits in agricultural microbes represent inventive steps of nature, but the inability of patent laws to reward nonhuman inventors has led to conflicts over microbial ownership rights and presents barriers to the sharing of benefits.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought mRNA vaccines to market in a short period, pointing the entire drug development field in the direction of mRNA treatment.
An analysis of the overlap of authors and inventors in a comprehensive citation map of patents to the biomedical research literature reveals significant and persistent disparities within the commercialization process.
Patent office data show robust and rising patenting of AI inventions in the medical field, contrary to fears that medical machine learning patents might be largely unavailable because of challenges to their subject-matter eligibility.