Current limits on patent eligibility are spurring innovation vital to mitigating future pandemics
Alex Moss, 24 - the executive director of the Public Interest Patent Law Institute. She was previously at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a patent litigator at Sullivan & Cromwell. After graduating from Stanford Law School, she served as a judicial clerk to the Honorable Timothy B. Dyk of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Letter to Senators Durbin, Coons, Tillis, and Representatives Issa and Lofgren on the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2023, signed by American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Generation Patient, Public Citizen, Public Interest Patent Law Institute, and the R Street Institute. 1/30, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60e5457fb89be21d705fa914/t/65b9687cbb120871dd820938/1706649724600/Public+Interest+Letter+re+PERA+-+01.30.24.pdf //DH
Indeed, Captain Kimberly J. Elenberg, Director for Force Modeling and Analytics for the Department of Defense Coronavirus 2019 Task Force, has credited current patent eligibility jurisprudence for playing a large role in allowing her team to coordinate the military’s response to the pandemic.14 For example, researchers discovered that a significant proportion of individuals infected with COVID-19 shed virus RNA in their stool, and therefore the level of virus RNA in wastewater can be measured to track community infection trends.15 Under existing patent eligibility law, the correlation between the amount of virus RNA in stool samples and community infection levels was not eligible for patenting, even with the addition of a conventional wastewater test. Therefore, both the CDC and military could freely conduct wastewater tests and use the results to determine where to allocate testing resources.
Current patent eligibility law also plays a key role in protecting the public from future pandemics. Just like tracking new variants, detecting the emergence of new viruses requires unrestricted access to gene sequences, natural correlations, and conventional analytic methods implemented on generic computers. For example, Dr. Christopher Mason of Wiell Medical College has led a coordinated effort among researchers to sequence and characterize microbiota (bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microbes) in cities across the world.16 Thus far, their work has identified 10,928 viruses and 748 kinds of bacteria that had never before been documented. 17 Thanks to the ability to freely match genes associated with pathogenic viruses as well as antimicrobial resistance to newly identified strains, Dr. Mason’s program is already helping us prepare for (and potentially mitigate) future health crises.18