News and insights

Subscribe to our newsletter

Can you patent a nose?

That was one of a myriad of provocative questions at a recent panel called “Gene Patenting: Balancing Access and Innovation” co-sponsored by the ӳý and the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. (That’s myriad with a lower-case ‘m’ – not to be confused with the controversy that recently burst into the news in a court case known as ACLU v. Myriad Genetics. The more formal name is The Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v. The United States Patent and Trademark Office, et al.)

When Cory Johannessen was a graduate student at Harvard Medical School, he started getting very exciting results. The anti-cancer drug he and his colleagues were testing in mice was working well, and was on the path toward clinical trials in people. But Johannessen’s excitement gave way to frustration. As he finished up graduate school, the cancer came back in the mice. The clinical trial hadn’t even started, and already Johannessen could see what might happen in patients: some would get better at first, but eventually their cancer would find a way to mutate and become resistant.

The past year has brought to light both the promise and the frustration of developing new drugs to treat melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer. Early clinical tests of a candidate drug aimed at a crucial cancer-causing gene revealed impressive results in patients whose cancers resisted all currently available treatments. Unfortunately, those effects proved short-lived, as the tumors invariably returned a few months later, able to withstand the same drug to which they first succumbed. Adding to the disappointment, the reasons behind these relapses were unclear.