...An expert in bioinformatics...[Bob Shafer is] waging a battle to wipe out a pair of patents that he believes threaten to destroy his life’s work, Shafer has racked up more than $100,000 in legal bills while putting himself at odds with Stanford University, where he is an associate professor of medicine and pathology.
The cause Shafer is staking his career, reputation, and retirement nest egg on is the HIV Drug Resistance Database [HIVdb], a highly regarded free resource that he developed, Stanford hosts, and doctors and scientists around the world rely on. Shafer says he’s fighting for more than the survival of his creation —he’s fighting for the future of bioinformatics research itself. It’s something he and many colleagues believe is imperiled by a European company’s move to assert a patent claim against Stanford over the database. “They are saying that if you want to use computers to help doctors make medical decisions, you have to give us money,” Shafer says of the company, Advanced Biological Laboratories [ABL]....
The standoff...comes at a time when the outer boundaries of what constitutes patentable subject matter are in flux....
Shafer arrived at Stanford nearly 20 years ago, and launched the HIVdb online in 1998. Since then, the database has built a following among HIV researchers and practitioners around the world, attracting some 50,000 unique visitors a month....
The database allows users to enter genetic information for viruses from individual patients or groups of patients, and to retrieve drug resistance information, which can then be used to help devise treatment regimens....
“Fantastic” is how Mark Wainberg, a professor of molecular biology at McGill University in Montreal, and a former president of the International AIDS Society–USA, describes the database: “It provides the ability to interpret what can sometimes be very complicated patterns of resistance.”
[The] ABL...patents...describe a way of doctors using databases to diagnose and treat diseases....
Shafer’s colleagues say that recognizing the validity of ABL’s patents could harm all types of research. David Katzenstein, a Stanford scientist who studies HIV in the developing world, sees gene therapy as one area of study that could suffer. “If you read [ABL’s patents] literally, anyone who is providing therapeutic options based on the sequence of a pathogen violates their patent, and that goes on in hundreds of contexts. It’s truly a dangerous precedent.” ...
“They want to make knowledge a commodity,” Shafer says. “That’s why I can’t back down.”
...Advanced Biological Laboratories...seems to be trying to claim to have rights over many (or maybe they think all) uses of...computers to help doctors make medical decisions. And they have been trying to get people to license their IP/software for doing this and one way they appear to be trying to get "users" is by suing them....
Sadly, Stanford University appears to have given in to the lawsuits even though their validity is debatable...and Bob has been left hanging on his own. Instead of caving to the lawsuit and shutting down HIVDB or making it less openly available or requiring people to say they will give commercial rights to Advanced Biological Laboratories for anything they develop using the DB. And rather than cave to the lawsuits Bob is fighting back - with a website called harmfulpatents.org and with a set of letters and communications....[I]f this lawsuit leads to the shutting down or restriction of HIVDB that would be proof enough to me that Advanced Biological Laboratories and the legal system that supports them is doing a disservice to the progress of science.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/09/2009 11:51:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
