Please explain this to me: Company owns patent on human gene

[toadspittle]

OK. I know corporations have patented genes before, but I thought it was more along the lines of them patenting specific genetically engineered/bred strains of bacteria, etc. But this article makes it sound like a preexisting human gene has been patented:

Deepak Gill, head of neurology at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, said he would test at least 50 per cent more infants for the SCN1A gene - which would diagnose the disabling Dravet syndrome - if the hospital could conduct the test in-house.

But rights to the gene are controlled by the Melbourne-based Genetic Technologies, which has already threatened to stop public hospitals testing for breast cancer gene mutations, and the hospital will not risk a similar problem.

… but the article is confusing, because I’m not sure if the patent, in fact, has something to do with the *test: *

John Christodoulou, director of the Western Sydney Genetics Program, based at the same hospital, said his laboratory could not risk SCN1A testing in case Genetic Technologies - which licenses the gene patent from an Adelaide biotechnology firm, Bionomics - later barred him from testing or imposed a prohibitive royalty.

… so, is there a gene that is contained inside preexisting human beings that has been patented by a private firm? Or is the patented gene part of the test kit? If the former, um, hasn’t anyone heard of “prior art” before? May I now patent Oxygen?

[Outpits]

I have not looked at the patent in question, but the normal way of patenting a naturally occurring gene is to claim it as an “Isolated nucleic acid sequence comprising…[description of gene].” The term “isolated” is then defined as differing from the wild-type and means that it has been cloned into a different environment. By doing this, the patentee is getting a patent to a new invention (a newly discovered/isolated gene), but is not claiming the prior art (the gene in its naturally occurring state. In your example, if you were the first one to have purified oxygen from the air, you would be entitled to a patent claiming purified oxygen.

[Smeghead]

If you do the work to prove that a specific gene is important for a specific condition, you get the rights to that use of it. In the lab I used to work at, we used to test the apoE gene. This gene has several alleles that are important in two separate conditions. They’re correlated to both Alzheimer’s disease and cholesterol processing. We were allowed to test only for the cholesterol part, because another company owned the rights to the Alzheimer’s part. So even though we were testing the exact same gene for the exact same mutations, in our lab report we were only allowed to talk about the cholesterol side of things. If the doctor wanted to know about the patient’s Alzheimer risk due to this gene, he’d theoretically have to pay the other company to retest the same gene and get the same result. In reality, though, I’m sure most of them would have realized how dumb that is.

That’s an extreme example, but it shows how these issues are working out at the moment.

[Spezza]

If you are worried about organizations copyrighting and profiting off personal genetic information, the precedent is pretty old.