Patents on Life: a view from the European Patent Office

Day 2 of the Patents on Life conference has begun.

Christopher Rennie-Smith, former chair of the Biotech Board of Appeal and former member of the Board of Appeal at the European Patent Office, spoke on life-form patents before the European Patent Office. There is no overall provision re patenting life forms in the European Patent Convention (EPC), and general exclusions do not include any life form, so life forms that are novel, inventive and industrially applicable are patentable. Article 53 excludes when contrary to "ordre public" or morality; and excludes plant or animal varieties or essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals. "Morality" has been defined in case law as the belief that some behavior is right and other behavior is wrong founded on the totality of accepted norms rooted in the culture inherent in European society.  There is no definition of "animal variety" or "essentially biological process."  He discussed the case of the Harvard oncomouse, which presented the question whether Article 53 would function as a bar given the suffering of the genetically manipulated animals and possible risks to the environment posed by the release of manipulated animals. In the end, claims limited to a transgenic mouse (but not a transgenic rodent) succeeded. The method of producing the transgenic mouse was deemed not "an essentially biological process."