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PIPRA is working with the University of California Berkeley to further develop and maintain a database of agricultural technologies owned by PIPRA member institutions. The database contains over 4,500 records consisting of utility patents, plant patents and patent applications owned by members. A distinctive feature of the database is the licensing information that informs users about technologies that are exclusively licensed and those that might be available for use. Current PIPRA members control almost 40% of all US public sector agricultural intellectual property. Almost 75% of the technologies in the database are unlicensed, non-exclusively licensed and have limited option agreements and therefore potentially available for use by researchers.
For database access please contact Mary Louise "Mike" Trammell by email at trammell@email.arizona.edu or call (520) 626-7916.
Certain enabling technologies essential to agricultural sciences, such as transformation methods, constitutive promoters and selectable markers, are protected by patents controlled by large agricultural companies. Many of these technologies were invented at public institutions and licensed exclusively to private industry, thus making them unavailable to the scientists that created them. For example, DNA transformation methods routinely used to develop transgenic plants that depend on Agrobacterium tumefaciens or biolistic-mediated gene transfer are exclusively licensed in most fields of use.
In an effort to resolve problems of IP inaccessibility, PIPRA is in the process of developing alternative core technologies. Currently PIPRA researchers are exploring new promoters comparable to those licensed to the private sector that will efficiently control gene expression. Through its collaborations with the USDA, PIPRA hopes to identify constitutive, tissue specific, inducible and synthetic promoters. PIPRA will make these innovations available to researchers at member institutions through a non-exclusive license with no transaction costs. Non-exclusive licenses will also be available to private industry; however PIPRA will charge appropriate fees to reimburse its research and patent costs.
PIPRA staff and researchers will pool complimentary technologies from the database to develop research tools and products that will be made available to member institutions on a non-exclusive basis. Patent pools have been used by industry when multiple proprietary patents block the development of a key technology that can benefit the public or developing countries, as illustrated by the "Golden Rice" case. The patent pooling strategy has been effective in expediting the development of more than 70 technologies with significant societal impact for agricultural researchers and small subsistence farmers in developing countries.
