The Epigenetics Revolution by Nessa Carey Read Free Book Online

that he was right. He shared the 2009 Lasker Prize with John Gurdon so maybe he’s not really all that concerned. His reputation is now assured.
    Follow the money
    If all we read is the scientific literature, then the narrative for this story is quite inspiring and fairly straightforward. But there’s another source of information, and that’s the patent landscape, which typically doesn’t emerge from the mist until some time after the papers in the peer-reviewed journals. Once the patent applications in this field started appearing, a somewhat more complicated tale began to unfold. It takes a while for this to happen, because patents remain confidential for the first year to eighteen months after they are submitted to the patent offices. This is to protect the interests of the inventors, as this period of grace gives them time to get on with work on confidential areas without declaring to the world what they’ve invented. The important thing to realise is that both Yamanaka and Jaenisch have filed patents on their research into controlling cell fate. Both of these patent applications have been granted and it is likely that cases will go to court to test who can really get protection for what. And the odd thing, given that Yamanaka published first, is the fact that Jaenisch filed a patent on this field before him.
    How could that be? It’s partly because a patent application can be quite speculative. The applicant doesn’t have to have proof of every single thing that they claim. They can use the grace period to try to obtain some proof to support their assertions from the original claim. In US legal terms Shinya Yamanaka’s patent dates from 13 December 2005 and covers the work described a few paragraphs ago – how to take a somatic cell and use the four factors – Oct4 , Sox2 , Klf4 and c-Myc – to turn it into a pluripotent cell. Rudolf Jaenisch’s patent potentially could have a legal first date of 26 November 2003. It contains a number of technical aspects and it makes claims around expressing a pluripotency gene in a somatic cell. One of the genes it suggests is Oct4. Oct4 had been known for some time to be vital for the pluripotent state, after all, that’s one of the reasons why Yamanaka had included it in his original reprogramming experiments. The legal arguments around these patents are likely to run and run.
    But why did these labs, run by fabulous and highly creative scientists, file these patents in the first place? Theoretically, a patent allows the holder access to an exclusive means of doing something. However, in academic circles nobody ever tries to stop an academic scientist in another lab from running a basic science experiment. What the patent is really for is to make sure that the original inventor makes money out of their good idea, instead of other people cashing in on their inventiveness.
    The most profitable patents of all in biology tend to be things that can be used to treat disease in people, or that help researchers to develop new treatments faster. And that’s why there is going to be such a battle over the Jaenisch and Yamanaka patents. The courts may decide that every time someone makes iPS cells, money will have to be paid to the researchers and institutions who own the original ideas. If companies sell iPS cells that they make, and have to give a percentage of the income back to the patent holders, the potential returns could be substantial. It’s worth looking at why these cells are viewed as potentially so valuable in monetary terms.
    Let’s take just one disease, type 1 diabetes. This typically starts in childhood when certain cells in the pancreas (the delightfully named beta cells in the Islets of Langerhans) are destroyed through processes that aren’t yet clear. Once lost, these cells never grow back and as a consequence the patient is no longer able to produce the hormone insulin. Without insulin it’s impossible to control blood sugar levels and the consequences of