Wednesday, May 16, 2012

BCBR: 'Biotechs abuzz over high court rulings'

Quoting from the May 15th article by Beth Potter:

"In the high-stakes world of drug research, local biotechnology companies are asking how recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings on drug patent issues may affect them in the future...

At the Colorado BioScience Association, executive director Holli Riebel also is taking a wait-and-see attitude about the recent court rulings.

But Riebel says the naturally occurring process issue is 'a really controversial issue' that appears to affect quite a bit of the research being done in Colorado.

'If you have spent a lot of time to develop a process or an understanding of how something works, and you use that as basic premise to understand something else and to develop a therapeutic around it, people want to patent that,' Riebel said.

The national court rulings may affect future investment in the biotech industry, Riebel believes.

'You’ve spent millions of dollars in investment to understand the way something works that nobody has understood before, and it’s used to help save human lives,' Riebel said. 'To say you can’t patent that — how are you going to get people to invest money into furthering innovation and science.'

Link to the article

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