Washington

Guidelines on research tools issued recently by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) came under fire last week from representatives of several small biotechnology companies at a symposium on intellectual property organized by the National Academy of Sciences.

The guidelines advise researchers in general who use NIH money to generate tools — such as reagents and new transgenic technologies — against demanding ‘reach-through’ rights that claim future intellectual property on products generated from a tool's use (see Nature 403, 10; 2000).

But Robert Blackburn, vice-president and chief patent council of Chiron, a private biotech company based in Emeryville, California, said that biotech companies need both reach-through rights and licensing arrangements — without compensation for their intellectual property, they would have a difficult time surviving.

Intellectual property gives biotech companies “the right to be in the market”, says Evelyn McConathy, a patent lawyer with the Philadelphia firm Dilworth Paxson LLP, adding that the market, not government policy, should drive licensing deals.

But she admits that a “large outcry” followed DuPont's initial demands that researchers accept reach-through terms if they use Cre-lox, which allows genes to be removed from specific cells and tissues. The outcry forced the company to allow non-profit researchers freely to use the technology, which was developed using NIH funding (see Nature 394, 819; 1998).