BIO: Protecting innovation
Biotechnology is a dynamic, job-creating industry and presents economic growth opportunities in countries all over the world.
The majority of biotech companies are small and medium-sized enterprises. What these companies share is a philosophy that is vital to the task of developing biotech products—a willingness to take huge risks and invest private capital in the development of new technologies that will lead to innovative products and services that improve people’s lives.
For the global biotech industry to realise its full promise, nations must ensure they have the right public policy environment. Broad international support for strong intellectual property protection will continue to play an important role in the long-term success of healthcare biotech companies and their ability to bring new drugs to patients. Stable, forward-thinking policy is also necessary to support the emergence and growth of agriculture and industrial biotech companies around the globe.
There is a clear link between a country’s rate of economic development and the strength of its IP laws. Biotech companies rely heavily on the strength and scope of their patents to generate the significant investment necessary to bring biotech therapies and other products to market.
The importance of international IP protection has increased as these companies seek to expand the markets for their products that improve the health and wellbeing of people throughout the world.
The majority of biotech companies are businesses that have no products on the market, so their research and development (R&D) activities are financed through massive amounts of private sector investment—on average, more than $2 billion per new biotech medicine—which must be sustained over many years, sometimes even decades.
Without strong, predictable and enforceable patent protection, investors will stop investing in biotech innovation or limit such investment to the inventions with ‘rock solid’ patents. This decline in investment will degrade our ability to provide solutions to the most pressing medical, agricultural, industrial and environmental challenges the world faces.
Unique challenges
While the biotech industry faces some of the same challenges as other industries (including counterfeiting, compulsory licensing, patent office inefficiencies and different judicial standards for enforcement), it also faces unique challenges such as the differing standards for the patentability of biotech inventions, genetic resource access and benefit regimes, and technology transfer issues.
Another challenge is attracting sufficient investment to finance R&D of new products. Access to capital has become much more difficult for innovative early stage companies. Depressed investment in small biotech startups means that potential breakthroughs are often left on the laboratory shelf.
"Congress should target not only abuses committed by patent owners, but also abuses by those who seek to undermine the patent system for similarly illegitimate reasons."
Our industry has developed hundreds of innovative products that are helping to heal, feed, and fuel the world. In the healthcare sector alone, the biotech industry has developed and commercialised more than 300 biotech therapies, cures, vaccines and diagnostics that are helping more than 325 million people worldwide who are suffering from cancer, HIV/AIDS, and many other serious diseases and conditions. Another 400 biotech medicines are in the pipeline.
In the agricultural field, biotech innovations are helping the economy to grow worldwide by simultaneously increasing food supplies, conserving natural resources of land, water and nutrients, and increasing farm income.
Within the field of industrial biotech, companies are leading the way in creating conventional biofuels, and next generation advanced biofuels, which can be produced from forest residues, algae, municipal solid waste, or other renewal sources of biomass.
It is essential for governments that want to foster a robust biotech innovation environment to create a set of strong IP standards—particularly those governing data protection, patents and trade secret protection—which are relevant to biological products.
BIO meeting
The 2015 BIO international convention, taking place from June 15 to 18 in Philadelphia, in the US, will address the need for internationally consistent IP standards during the emerging opportunities in global markets forum. This forum is specifically designed to highlight biotech initiatives in global markets, looking at emerging economies and global initiatives and at trends that affect the industry’s landscape. The forum will provide an overview of developments in key markets, policy trends, unique collaborations and cross-border initiatives to further innovation.
In the US for example, Congress is debating legislation to crack down on so-called ‘patent trolls’, which take advantage of the patent system for financial gain rather than to promote innovation. BIO strongly believes that law makers must target such abuses while ensuring that responsible patent owners remain able to protect and enforce their patents in a timely and efficient manner. We also believe that Congress should target not only abuses committed by patent owners, but also abuses by those who seek to undermine the patent system for similarly illegitimate reasons.
Patents are essential to ensuring the steady stream of investment necessary to develop innovative medicines, alternative sources of domestic renewable energy, and more productive and sustainable farming techniques that raise farm incomes and reduce environmental degradation. They are essential to the technology transfer process that leads from inventions in the lab to products on the shelves.
A BIO-commissioned study, published in March and called The Economic Contribution of University/Nonprofit Inventions in the US: 1996 to 2013, found that academic technology transfer had contributed $1.18 trillion to the US economy since 1996.
There has never been a better time to be in the biotech industry. Scientific advances and unique market opportunities are fuelling innovation, job creation and economic growth.
From groundbreaking new medicines that are helping to cure and treat previously untreatable diseases, to renewable chemicals and biofuels that are helping to lessen global reliance on fossil fuels, to biotech crops that are allowing farmers to feed a growing, global population, biotech innovations are creating enormous economic opportunities for businesses and communities around the world.
Our goal at BIO is to make sure that we build on this momentum and realise the full economic and societal benefits of biotechnology innovation.
Jim Greenwood is president and chief executive of BIO, the world’s largest trade association representing biotechnology companies, academic institutions, state biotech centres and related organisations across the US, and in more than 30 other nations. He can be contacted at: info@bio.o
