Course description

Study of cases in intellectual property (IP) in biotechnology. Criteria for patentability. Breadth of claims, reduction to practice, fair basing. Process and product patents. Terms of patent in biotechnology. Differences in patent rules between countries. Plant breeders rights. Prohibitions/exclusions from patentability in biotechnology. Compulsory licensing. Illustrative Case studies in biotechnology IP: The GTG patents, the PCR patents, Taxol patents, Neem patents, Turmeric patents, rice patents, Affymetrix patents, "Southern" patents, EST patents, sequence patents, stem cell patents. Strategies for managing biotechnology IP Analysis of the parts of a patent and a critical examination of a patent in the context of prior art. Preparation of a case study in IP conflict, dispute or debate in biotechnology. Due to a limited number of places available in this course, there will be a selection process for enrolment with places being allocated based on the results from the prerequisite course and merit using the student's overall GPA as the criterion.

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