The new initiative, called the Public-Sector Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture (PIPRA), is described in the July 11 issue of Science. PIPRA is a roadmap of sorts, one that will help guide scientists at public research institutions in managing and sharing their intellectual property.
It will also change how universities and other research institutions license new technological developments. The end result will be that universities will have an easier time researching and commercializing new crops when multiple institutions own parts of the intellectual property rights.
A patent protects intellectual property and is generally issued to the inventor of a new technology, while a license gives a business or institution the right to put that intellectual property into use.
"Creating across-the-board access to proprietary and patented agricultural information will be a boon for our researchers and their colleagues at other institutions," said Ohio State President Karen Holbrook, a co-author of the report.
"By sharing such knowledge with peer institutions we can better serve local communities economically while supporting our university's global-scale humanitarian efforts."
Land-grant institutions, including Ohio State, historically are the source for information on new, improved crop varieties and other advances in biotechnology. But the last 20 years have brought about important changes in the way in which intellectual property rights for living material are being granted, as well as the way public institutions manage their intellectual property.
Such fundamental changes in the nature and ownership of innovations in basic and applied agricultural research have complicated the mission of U.S. public research institutions, according to the report. Agricultural innovations are increasingly more important, reflected by the biotechnology industry's desire to license such information and keep it proprietary.
"In biotechnology, there are so many patents affecting the various processes involved in a new development that any one of those patents can block commercialization or use of that invention," said Steven Slack, Ohio State's associate vice president for agricultural administration. "Involvement in PIPRA lets member institutions have access to multiple technologies that are patented by other institutions or otherwise protected."
Slack, who also directs the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster, added that multiple institutions often hold patents for some aspect of the same technology, which may constrain the commercialization of the technology or the actual research that the investigator is involved in.
A university can assign use of its intellectual property rights through licensing the development to businesses interested in commercialization.
In agriculture, the greatest business value involves big-market crops that grow on tens of millions of acres in the United States, such as corn, wheat, soy, cereal grains and cotton. However, many patents cover specific steps or processes that lead to the development of new varieties of crops and, therefore, affect not only these major crops, but specialty crops as well.
Specialty crops, such as cranberries and pumpkins, are grown on many fewer acres of land, often in specific regions of the country.
These specialty crops aren't as financially attractive to big-market agricultural companies, and the complicated negotiations needed to enable public scientists access to appropriate technology to develop improved varieties of these crops is inhibitory, Slack said. There is a similar impact in developing crops globally, which hinders subsistence farmers in developing countries who depend on new technological developments to improve their staple crops.
According to the report, public sector institutions hold roughly one-quarter of currently patented agricultural inventions - a substantially larger holding of intellectual property than any single agricultural biotechnology company. But these holdings are fragmented at best. Multiple ownerships make it difficult for a single institution to have access to a complete set of intellectual property rights, which is needed to commercialize a new crop variety.
Driving PIPRA is the belief that these inventions - often made by scientists at public research institutions - are necessary to help improve specialty crops grown in the United States as well as to assist subsistence farmers in developing countries in growing enough food.
To meet these goals, PIPRA member institutions plan to:
- Establish a mechanism for easy information exchange among PIPRA partners.
- Give researchers the freedom to operate by clearing all intellectual property barriers as well as the regulatory and cultural constraints associated with bringing a new product to market.
- When issuing new licenses to private-sector agriculture businesses, public-sector institutions will include a clause in the license retaining the rights to use the new technology for humanitarian purposes.
- Work toward food security for the poor of the world. To do so, members will accelerate research and development in order to improve staple crops such as rice, sorghum and cassava, crops that are essential to subsistence farmers in developing countries who face serious problems with drought, poor soils and plant diseases.
- Help states improve the nutritional quality, disease-resistance and environmental impact of specialty crops in the United States, as well as create potential new markets for these foods.
- Work with the private sector to develop opportunities for commercializing new technological developments.
PIPRA participants include Cornell, Michigan State, North Carolina, and Ohio State universities; Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; the University of California System, including UC-Riverside and UC-Davis; the universities of Florida and Wisconsin-Madison; the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research; the Rockefeller and McKnight foundations; and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center.
Contact: Steven Slack, 330-263-3701; Slack.36@osu.edu or oardc@osu.edu.
Written by Holly Wagner, 614-292-8310; Wagner.235@osu.edu
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Science