Social Lives
Authors: Professor Aisling McMahon, Principal Investigator (PI) & Sinéad Masterson, Project Manager, PatentsInHumans
On 20th April 2023, the PatentsInHumans team were delighted to host the public launch event for the European Research Council (ERC) funded PatentsInHumans project in Maynooth University. The event was attended by over 45 individuals, including, members of the public, students and academics working in a range of disciplines (including law, biology, political science and business), practising lawyers, and technology transfer specialists.
The PatentsInHumans project, based in the School of Law and Criminology and ALL Institute at Maynooth University, commenced on the 1st November 2022 and is a large interdisciplinary five-year project. It is funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant and led by Professor Aisling McMahon. Alongside Professor McMahon, the PatentsInHumans team includes project manager, Sinéad Masterson, and postdoctoral researcher, Dr Opeyemi Kolawole. As the project develops, we will be recruiting more researchers to join the team in the coming months and years ahead.
Together, the PatentsInHumans team will work to tackle the central research question, which examines what are the main bioethical implications posed by patents over ‘technologies’ related to the human body (including, over medicines, elements of medical diagnostic technologies, medical devices, and isolated human genes), and how are these bioethical issues accounted for, if at all, within European patent decision-making.
The public launch event for the PatentsInHumans project held on 20th April 2023 provided an opportunity to introduce the project to the broader community and to focus attention on the impacts that patents – and particularly, how such patents are used – can have on access and delivery of healthcare. Such issues resonate strongly with the aims of the ALL institute which focuses on the development and application of technologies to assist people in living to their full potential. PatentsInHumans will focus on how patents over emerging health technologies can potentially impact the experiences of users/patients/providers of such technologies. It seeks to develop a person-centred approach to the grant and use of patents in this context.
Dr Fergus Ryan (Head of the School of Law and Criminology) commenced proceedings at the launch event by offering a welcome address and introductory remarks. Dr Ryan offered an overview of the origins and achievements of the School of Law and Criminology, and in particular, he noted the School’s research-intensive focus with academic colleagues publishing in a range of internationally leading peer-reviewed outlets and contributing important policy work in both the national and international contexts.
Following this, Professor Aisling McMahon introduced the ERC PatentsInHumans project and provided a brief project overview, including its central research questions (see above). She explained that patents are a type of intellectual property right which give the rightsholder(s), the right to stop others using a patented technology for the duration of the patent – usually 20 years under the applicable laws. Thus, depending on how rightsholder(s) use patent rights – including how they enforce these – such rights have the potential to impact how the patented technology is used, on what terms and by whom. The human body itself is not patentable (Directive 98/44/EC Article 5(1)), but patents are available on a range of technologies which relate to the human body including, medicines, elements of medical devices and isolated human genes. She highlighted examples demonstrating how patent rights over such technologies are used has the potential to pose significant bioethical implications, including affecting patient autonomy over access to such technologies, by impacting their cost and supply. She argued that the way in which these rights are used can thus, potentially, have a significant impact on how we treat, use and modify our bodies. The PatentsInHumans project aims to comprehensively examine and understand such implications. Following this presentation, Professor Susi Geiger (UCD) and Dr Christine Kelly (UCD) delivered presentations which examined the bioethical and social implications of how patents are used over health-technologies, drawing on these speakers respective disciplinary backgrounds in healthcare markets and public health.
Professor Susi Geiger is a Full Professor in the School of Business, University College Dublin, and the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council MISFIRES Project (2018-2024) (funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant). During her presentation, Professor Geiger shared her reflections based on her research from a markets perspective. In doing so, she highlighted the potential societal implications of patents in the healthcare markets context, including their impacts on access to healthcare. She highlighted failures by industry in this regard, including by impeding access to medicines through high costs, by being overly selective in which markets they enter, or by blocking access of generic products entering the market.
Dr Christine Kelly is an Infectious Diseases Physician and Clinical Academic with a specialist interest in HIV as a chronic inflammatory disease in low-income sub-Saharan Africa and is currently working as an Honorary Clinical Research Fellow within the Centre for Experimental Pathogen Host Research at UCD. Dr Kelly outlined her clinical work on HIV particularly in Malawi where she experienced first-hand the impact that patents can have on the availability of medicines. Moreover, in the COVID-19 context, she highlighted that patents impacted the availability of vaccines and this in turn hugely affected how clinicians could respond to and treat their patients during the pandemic. She argued for the need to rethink current innovation processes around patents and health to be prepared for the next pandemic.
In the second half of the PatentsInHumans public launch event, Professor Jorge Contreras delivered the keynote lecture entitled “The Civil Rights Case Against Gene Patents in America” and reflected on his research and recent book The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA (Hachette/Algonquin, 2021) which has been strongly acclaimed in reviews in the NY Times, Wall St. Journal, Nature and other outlets, and was named “Best Patent Law Book of the Year” in 2021 by the international IPKat blog. Professor Jorge Contreras is the James T. Jensen Endowed Professor for Transactional Law and Director of the Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Human Genetics, University of Utah School of Medicine. During 2023, he was a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Professor Contreras is a leading international expert in the field of intellectual property, antitrust law and science policy. Professor Contreras’s keynote lecture considered the United States Supreme Court case, Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, which involved a challenge to patents over isolated human genes. This topic has strong synergies and relevance for the PatentsInHumans project, as the bioethical issues posed by the patentability of isolated elements of the human body – and how such patents are used – is one of the key categories of ‘technologies’ examined by the PatentsInHumans project. This lecture provided a fascinating account of the litigation in the Myriad case which eventually led to isolated human genes being deemed unpatentable in the US.
The full report of the PatentsInHumans public launch event is now published and offers a detailed summary of the presentations at the launch event. It is available here.
We would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the European Research Council in funding this project. We are also very grateful for the support of the School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University which co-funded the reception following this project launch event, and we would also like to acknowledge support of the ALL Institute in Maynooth University which co-hosts the project alongside the School of Law and Criminology.
You can find out more about our project and future activities and events by visiting our website: www.patentsinhumans.eu and follow us on twitter @patentsinhumans.
Funded by the European Union (ERC, PatentsInHumans, Project No.101042147). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.