As biotechnology continues to expand the boundaries of medical treatment, it is important to protect the traditional medicines used and developed over hundreds of years by communities around the world. To that end, the Indian and U.S. government have recently taken steps to ensure the protection of intellectual property of traditional knowledge and medicines.
The goal of both actions is to limit the misappropriation of traditional knowledge through mistaken issuance of patents, also known as “biopiracy.” In a press release, Sharon Barner, Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the USPTO, said “The USPTO has long been concerned about attempts to patent traditional knowledge, not only because it may result in an incorrectly granted patent, but also because it removes knowledge from the public domain.”
In a Memorandum of Understanding between India’s Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the countries agreed to bilateral cooperation on protecting intellectual property rights of traditional medicines.
In addition to the Memorandum, India provided access to their newly developed Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) a research tool containing 2000,000 traditional medical formulations. Developed by India’s Council of Scientific & Industrial Research and the Department of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopath, Unani, Sidda and Homeopathy, the database currently comprises 30 million pages and has been translated into English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish. TKDL could provide U.S. patent examiners with the needed evidence to deny a patent application claiming a new invention for what is in fact traditional knowledge, something they have failed to do in the past.
After the US and European Union granted of patents for the wound-healing properties of turmeric and pesticidial uses of seeds of the neem tree, Indian scientists argued the patents were biopiracy. Both turmeric and the neem tree (which is native to India) have been used in India for thousands of years. Through protracted legal battles, India successfully had both patents revoked.
Continued steps by both developed and developing countries, such as the ones recently taken by the Indian and U.S. government, are vital to ensure that traditional knowledge will continue to be available in the public domain. The TDKL is one of numerous databases and other tools that U.S. patent examiners will now have at their disposal deciding to accept or reject patent application that might conflict with traditional knowledge and medicine. As the economy grows increasingly more global, it is imperative that traditional medicine and knowledge is safeguarded from biopiracy. Collaboration between countries on the issue is certainly a step in the right direction.