Recent years have shown a remarkable increase of patents in the field of ICT and genetics. The omnipresence of patents in those areas has raised serious concerns about access to and use of ICT and genome related inventions, as the expansion of patents in those fields might result in a patent thicket. Collaborative licensing models, such as patent pools and clearing houses, have attracted great ...

BACKGROUND Not all new drug products are truly new. Some are the result of marginal innovation and incremental patenting of existing products, but in such a way that confers no major therapeutic improvement. This phenomenon, pejoratively known as "evergreening", can allow manufacturers to preserve market exclusivity, but without significantly bettering the standard of care. Other studies specul...

PURPOSE To examine the linkage between the funding of ophthalmologic and related biomedical research and the development of patented eye-care technology using data on patents granted and the scientific literature cited by those patents. METHODS The United States patents granted during the 20-year period from 1975 through 1994 were screened using patent office classifications and key words to ...

In the late 1990s, when the human genome project was beginning to look like a realistic endeavour, only to be challenged by the competing bid from entrepreneur and shotgun sequencing pioneer Craig Venter, the competition between a publicly funded sequencing effort and a private one raised the issue of who would own the genome data, and whether parts of it would be protected by patents. As genom...