Patent dispute threatens US Alzheimer's research

Patent dispute threatens US Alzheimer's research

The website of the Alzheimer's Institute of America (AIA) doesn't reveal much about the organization, but portrays it as committed to supporting research and patients. Among people who study Alzheimer's disease, however, the AIA, based in St Louis, Missouri, is best known for filing lawsuits against companies and researchers — a practice that scientists say could hamper the progress of research into combating the dreaded disease.

An AIA lawsuit filed in February 2010 against the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine — a source of laboratory mice funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) — now threatens hundreds of government-sponsored Alzheimer's researchers with litigation. The lab is so concerned about the financial and scientific costs of defending itself that it has asked the NIH to assume the defence of the case.

"The lawsuits raised by the AIA are unfortunate, and constitute a large drain on valuable scientific resources at a time when scientific funds are increasingly tight," says Benjamin Wolozin, an Alzheimer's researcher at Boston University in Massachusetts.

The suit concerns an AIA patent on a human DNA sequence used in mouse models of Alzheimer's disease. The sequence encodes the 'Swedish mutation' (discovered in a Swedish family), which causes early-onset Alzheimer's. Michael Mullan, a biomedical researcher who is now head of the Roskamp Institute in Sarasota, Florida, patented the sequence in 1995, then sold it to the AIA.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110405/full/472020a.html

A sequence is a product of the natural world, even a mutated sequence.

You can patent a treatment or a test based on a sequence, but you can't patent the sequence. Since there are no tests nor treatments, how the hell is this patent valid?