Patents not key – government funding better for pandemics

Patents Are Not Needed to Incentivize the Discovery of Genomic Sequences

As noted above, today a vast body of human and non-human genomic sequence data is available to researchers in public repositories (Contreras & Knoppers, 2018). The discovery of this data was largely supported by government and philanthropic funding sources. With advances in sequencing technology and a global recognition that genomic sequence data represent a scientific resource for all, the sequencing of new biological entities such as emergent viral strains can be, and is, accomplished quickly and efficiently through existing government-funded programs. The sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 virus by a coalition of Chinese university and public health agencies (Wu et al., 2020), with no attempt to patent their results, demonstrates this reality. Since then, substantial scientific advances have been made as new variants and mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have emerged during the course of the pandemic. As such, arguments that patenting is required to induce private actors to invest in this work are simply not applicable to the derivation of genomic sequence data today