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India to sign pact against patent arm-twisting
By agencies
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Monday, 12 September 2005, 19:30 IST
NEW DELHI: Without conceding to the WestÂ’s demand for raising patent laws to U.S. standards, India can now look forward to protecting its traditional knowledge against exploitation by innovators in developed nations.
The effort comes at a time when pharmaceutical MNCs are looking at biological resources and traditional knowledge to replenish their research pipeline, financial daily the Economic Times has reported.
In the absence of a globally binding framework to protect traditional knowledge, the Indian strategy is to help various governments to turn down patent applications by proving that the claimed “innovation” is nothing new.
The move is to get global patent offices in the U.S., the EU and Japan to accept India’s documented traditional knowledge as a non-patentable domain called “prior art”.
“We are getting positive responses to our proposal and plan to ink the first agreement with one of them shortly,” said a source. It is learnt that the law ministry is now vetting the draft for a pact with the European Patent Office.
This means that drug makers wonÂ’t get patents in the 30 nation trading block if the underlying knowledge is documented in India. In a limited way, this defeats the U.S. bargain for upward harmonization of patent laws in return for protecting centuries old knowledge in developing countries, the paper said.
India would also pursue similar deals with 11 international patent search agencies.
Targeting the global patent search mechanisms to prove that the claimed innovation was actually public knowledge for centuries is a low cost strategy, as an international consensus on greater disclosure of biological origin and benefit sharing is only a distant possibility.
While developing nations have incorporated disclosure norms in their patent laws, the U.S. and Japan out rightly reject any such suggestion. The EU agrees on greater disclosure, but does not favor patent applicants attaching evidence to show that the traditional knowledge holder is aware of the application and has agreed to a benefit sharing deal.
An agreement with the U.S. PTO will prove to be a low cost solution to protect IndiaÂ’s interest. Experts say that a quarter of all drug patents issued in the U.S. are of plant origin.
This “defensive protection of traditional knowledge and genetic resources”, is part of the government’s larger game plan, which also involves developing modern medicines from traditional knowledge.
The digital database which the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) and the Department of Ayush have developed, will help researchers identify the common plant parts and the active ingredients used in Ayurveda, Sidha and Unani medicines for curing the same disease.
Such easy identification of the lead for drug development will reduce costs from $1.5 billion to just $0.2 million besides reducing lab research time from 12 years to just three to four years, the paper said.