Whether you are employed as a scientist or as a company do research anywhere in California, including cities where biotechnology and other medical science is being studied or where research takes place, especially the areas around cities such as San Diego, Irvine, Orange County, Los Angeles, La Jolla, Riverside, Fullerton, San Francisco, Santa Barbara and other cities where there are universities or large research projects taking place in the U.S. and throughout the world, you know that patent laws and patent licensing is acting as a barrier to medical and biotechnology research and preventing advances in science.

It doesn't take a California patent attorney or CA patent lawyer to say how the world's patent system is today acting as a barrier to medical and biotechnology research that could solve many of today's worst diseases and preventing breakthrough treatments, medicines and even new seeds for better crops.

A new report has come out after a seven year study and confirmed what most patent licensing lawyers, medical researchers and biotechnologists have known for years. The patent system in force worldwide is broken and preventing breakthroughs in science.

Without a means for sharing information, blocking patents are causing delays in developing advances in cancer medicine treatments and in the development of new food crops.

The report performed by a Canada based partnership cited as examples of medical advances being delayed as those of HIV/Aids drugs and cancer screening tests.

Of concern to scientists is an increasingly bare medicine chest of new life-saving medicines that are critical not just to the developing world but to the industrialized nations as well to address disease. New food crops are also lagging behind that could help address hunger.

And while stem cell researchers apparently patent the most, they collaborate least according to the report.

What happens is that "blocking patents" act as barriers to research and advances in biotechnology that could advance cancer treatment, new medicines and new crops.

When biotech firms race to file a "fortress" of patents around newly discovered genes, research by their competitors is effectively blocked.

Another example given by scientists is work on genes that cause breast cancer in European countries that has been held up by patents held on specific genes by one biotech company in the U.S. With patients in European countries unable to meet the cost of certain cancer screening tests, they have been effectively denied access to such tests.

A recommendation of the report is that companies should be allowed to form "patent pools" where they could cross-license their patented technologies without losing royalties from their patents. It is also recommended that governments develop other public and private partnerships to conduct joint research.

The criticism of the current patenting system is that it acts more as a barrier than as an incentive to research and the development of medical or other biotechnological breakthroughs.

When a patent office grants dangerously broad patents, entirely new areas of research, such as in the field of nanotechnology, can be cut off.

So long as intellectual property and patent laws act as a barrier from others utilizing and expanding upon one scientist's research, the laws will prevent scientists from making advances that can benefit mankind. This lack of sharing is preventing biotechnology from becoming the field that it once promised.

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