The Faculty welcomes the award to John Liddicoat and Dr Kathy Liddell at the Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences (LML) of a Philomathia Forum award to continue their work on the intellectual property issues surrounding the realization of genomic medicine.
This award will support a workshop in July 2016 that will interrogate more deeply:
1. How, in the genomics sector, are firms capturing value, and in what ways are they using IP to assist them? In what ways does this differ between SMEs and multinationals?
2. How are legal developments in IP affecting (directly or through international ‘ripples’) business models in the genomics sector? (For instance legal developments in the US decisions of Myriad, Prometheus and Ariosa Diagnostics v Sequenom, and counterpart international decisions such as the recent Australian High Court ruling in D’Arcy v Myriad).
The workshop will continue a series of events including a successful workshop on IP issues in genomic medicine organised jointly by the LML and CSaP in May 2015, and a further workshop to be held in early 2016, supported by funds from OpenPlant and the NIHR. The latter workshop is organised jointly with CSaP and two University Strategic Research Initiatives: Synthetic Biology and Public Policy. It will look specifically at the concepts of ‘open science’ and ‘open innovation’, interrogating the extent to which such policies are appropriate for the bioresources in plant synthetic biology and genomic medicine.
John and Kathy will also be presenting research at an international conference on “The Law and Ethical Challenges of Personalised Medicine” in April 2016. This conference is being jointly organized by LML and CMEL (the Centre for Medical Ethics and Law, University of Hong Kong). Further details will be available shortly.
Please contact lml@law.cam.ac.uk if you have a special interest in this topic.
Image courtesy of Wellcome Images.