NEWS

Genetically mutated mice cause "zombie" patent war

Release time:

2017-03-24 14:59

Like a zombie kicking forward, the legal war over mutant mice in Alzheimer's research has taken place again, just four years after the last round of legal proceedings. In the latest case, the University of South Florida in Tampa (University Florida referred to as USF) sued the National Institutes of Health (National Institutes of Health referred to as NIH) for authorizing the sale of a special mouse used in the field. The first pre-trial hearing is scheduled for March 21 in federal court.

USF owns the mouse patent, but the NIH has signed an agreement with Jackson Laboratories, a non-profit organization in Bar Harbor, Maine, to provide the animals to researchers. The USF now claims that the school should receive some of the funds paid to the sponsors.

If the lawsuit, launched in December 2015, wins, it could set a precedent for other colleges, said Robert Cook-Deegan, an intellectual-property scholar at Arizona State University in Washington, D. C., in Arizona. This would threaten the ability to pay and the availability of experimental animals for more widespread Alzheimer's research.

"I think it's too greedy. "If other colleges and universities start doing the same, it will only end up raising the cost of research tools," Cook-Deegan said."

The mouse, a USF patent filed in 1997 and granted in 1998, expresses two mutated genes, APPK670 and M671. These genetic modifications help scientists study how amyloid develops in the brain and what behavioral changes occur before those plaques appear. The results showed that these two gene sequences protected transgenic mice that produced enhanced Alzheimer's-related amyloid accumulation and caused the mice to develop accelerated amyloid beta deposition over a period of weeks instead of nine months.

The current form has revisited the unpleasant experiences of the mutant mice used in previous similar cases in Alzheimer's research. In 2010, the American Alzheimer's Institute (AIA) in St. Louis, Missouri, directly sued the Jackson Laboratory (Jackson Laboratory). But the NIH ended up getting involved because it contracted with the Jackson lab to sell the mice. This move transfers the lawsuit to the federal government, making court proceedings more expensive and more difficult to defend.

The AIA eventually dropped the case in 2011, and its lawsuits against other biomedical companies were eventually dropped.

But these cases have come at a great price: cases in six jurisdictions have been in court for 18.7 years, involving at least 98 lawyers and resulting in 1143 legal documents. The legal action also raises concerns that the AIA will sue researchers who use the mice in question. The Jackson lab argues that such concerns would discourage researchers from sending mouse strains to labs such as their own for maintenance and sale.

News source:http://news.bioon.com/article/6700210.html

This news was re-edited and reorganized by the Huaxun team and added analytical comments.