Human Practices 2016

The main objective of a toolkit is to provide a readily accessible form of synthetic biology that is directed towards businesses and entrepreneurs. From this we extrapolated what it would take to possibly commercialize our product. We identified two issues that may arise as a result of our work.

The first issue is public perception. With disruptive technologies, progress increases exponentially as technical limitations are eliminated through prior innovations. Consequently, many of these new developments go unnoticed, and the only source of information that the public sees is from sensationalist news, usually denouncing the technology. Monsanto, for example, developed a new strain of wheat that was resistant to weed killer. Now farmers can simply spray their crop with pesticide without the fear of poisoning their harvest. The only issue is that, because Monsanto patented the crop, this gave the company legal control over the seed – and the ability to track if farmers were carrying seed over from last harvest. This clash between new innovations and traditional practices, and perceptions - coupled with the public’s uncertainty towards genetically modified organisms (GMOs) - gained Monsanto notoriety among its clientele.

We planned to address this issue by educating the public about synthetic biology - to eliminate any scepticism they might have. We went to St. Elizabeth Seton and made a presentation on the topic, during which we demonstrated basic techniques – such as extracting DNA from strawberry plants – and introduced them to the innovations that have been made in recent history.

The second issue that must be addressed from a business perspective is intellectual rights. The development of new technologies always poses a question about who owns the property. As a potential venture, we have to discuss the overall concept of trademarking, copyrighting, and patenting the idea. These areas bring about a host of challenges ranging from jurisdiction to what actually compromises the property in question. To create a solid source of revenue for the venture it is necessary to define and understand the many layers involving Intellectual Property Rights.

To discuss and learn more about this issue we consulted TEC Edmonton, an economic development agency. With them we conducted a Q&A session to understand the potential property right issues when designing and developing new technologies.

Intellectual Property Rights in Emerging Markets

Our human practices revolve around exploring the process of bringing our invention out from the lab into the market. In order to allow our technology to have access to a greater market share, one of the aspects we needed to address is protection of intellectual property not only in Canada but also in other emerging markets. We then contacted and collaborated with the Sichuan University (SCU-China) iGEM team in order to compare and contrast intellectual property rights in Canada and in China.

There are two methods in how our IP could be protected. The first is keeping the template strand, staples and final structure a trade secret. In both countries, trade secrets are not protected under any formal jurisdiction, however, the benefit of keeping it so are that any technical information in regards to the invention do not have to be disclosed to the public. The only disadvantage is when a trade secret ceases to be a secret any monetary value associated with the technology is usually diminished.

Alternatively, dNANO could be patented which would prevent others from copying the design and the processes associated to building the nano moulds. Since our current mould design was based off the M13mp18 phage genome, the template DNA on its own cannot be patented. However, what is unique is the staples utilized to fold the template into the mould structure, as well as the final mould product. As a future direction, we plan on synthesizing our own unique template strand that could be protected, this in turn would make the development of dNANO from start to finish unique.

However, one of the issues that arises from is the topic of compulsory licencing. This is where someone else can produce the same patented product without the consent of the patent holder while paying a fee. In China, compulsory licences are used in times of national emergencies the government may grant a compulsory license for use of an invention or utility model patent.

In contrast, according to Canadian intellectual property rights, compulsory licencing is generally utilized if the public benefits from the patented invention more so than reduced disclosure and innovation; and the public working in the patented invention outweigh the patentee’s private interests. Generally, this would be utilized to prevent monopolies.

Applying this information to our project, we realized that under special circumstances our intellectual property could be used by others without our consent in both countries. However, if we were to bring dNANO out as a venture, patenting our technology would be the best way to go. This is because a patent lasts 20 years in both countries and in those 20 years new dNANO parts can be created which could replace previous iterations of our moulds. Each new design could be patented, so as long new parts are developed within the 20 year time span, our intellectual property is protected. This will most likely be the case as the technical limitations hampering the scalability of DNA origami are overcome.

To read Laws on Intellectual Property Rights & Protection In Canada click here:

https://2016.igem.org/Team:IngenuityLab_Canada/Laws_Canada

To read Laws on Intellectual Property Rights & Protection In China click here:

https://2016.igem.org/Team:IngenuityLab_Canada/Laws_China