[krobison]

As far as I'm concerned this post is spam and should be deleted.

You have a bizarre definition of spam; other than the original poster mentioning his company, what does it have in common with spam?

[math_guy]

I think your main problem is that you sent your stuff to other labs without publishing it. I'm still not clear why you couldn't just test your products yourself and just publish it. If you send magical formulas to other labs without publishing, it doesn't surprise me that some aspiring scientist may try to claim it as their own in some capacity (or alter it a bit and then claim it as their own).

As for the law aspects; this is a great forum for technology but how many of us are really capable of discussing the law at a high level? Very few, if any, I would guess (certainly not me).

We sent our kit to other labs to test because we didn't really have much money since this was a garage project for us and we had to pay for it ourselves. We just didn't have enough money to keep making all of those sequencing runs. And we were also interested to know what other labs were able to do better than us. Also, we didn't send any code to other labs. Just our kit and the protocol to run it. But all they had to do was read the sequencing data and reverse-engineer some of it. The problem for everyone who did that was that you need the code to decode the entire thing. And the publishing aspect was just an after-thought for us. We stupidly thought that we could make the left-over kits (enough for about 25,000 patients/people) available for free to numerous labs.

As for your comments on the legal aspect, I wasn't trying to focus too much on the high-level legal aspects (though that would have also been fine to talk about). I was just curious what other people on this forum felt about that case, and more importantly, about how gene patenting and the lack of understanding in our gov't regarding technology (in this case, sequencing) will slow us down in our efforts to help people who are sick. But I get what you mean...sometimes I feel that you do need a law degree to understand even a simple case.

[math_guy]

Myriad is a co-licenser with the Hospital for Sick Children's in Toronto for the BRCA1/BRCA2 patents:

http://cbc.sh/KvJLQx

As far as I'm concerned, Myriad is just trying to scare people. In the end, defensible IP resides in the assay method to detect the mutation, and not the mutation itself.

Yeah, this is basically what I feel as well. I am pretty sure that any lab could sequence and provide the data to pretty much anyone and Myriad would just wait until that number got too large for them. First: they would send threatening letters. Then when the number grows enough to possibly threaten a tiny percentage of their business they would file a suit against all those labs. Since those labs would not have the legal resources to fight it they would just stop.

I think that is kinda what happened the first time. But then someone challenged them and it went all the way.

What I don't want to happen is that Myriad finds a way to still be able to patent those genes when they are almost done with their patent to begin with. Because if they were able to protect their ability to patent genes then other companies and sleazy start-ups will try to do the same with new genes or regions of the genome.

Basically, this is the real issue (to me, at least): if you spend time and money to determine that a set of genes are definitively related to a disease (or whatever) then should you be able to make money off of that discovery? And should the legal system keep other companies from trying to provide that data to people who could benefit health-wise from it?

I think it is a tough set of questions. Because I feel that capitalism is the best way to move forward. But I also feel that our genome is our's. And if I can sequence my entire genome, then find out (in some way...through the grapevine or the internet...or from wherever) that such-and-such gene could cause cancer for me then I shouldn't be sued for looking at my genome to see if I have it.

If we rule that,regardless, nothing in your personal genome can be patented then will it slow down the pace of research? Is it just the price we are gonna have to pay right now to get the entire genome thoroughly understood? Maybe it is worth it for some people to die now so that WAY more can live in the future?