Patent law could create an “ethical thicket” that discourages access to the medically and ethically dubious practice of heritable human-genome editing, said Jacob S. Sherkow, a professor of law at Illinois and bioethics expert.
Source: L. Brian Stauffer
Applied judiciously, patent law could create an “ethical thicket” around human genome editing that ultimately discourages access to “germline editing”—that is, changing sperm and egg to create designer children—in more permissive countries such as China, Greece, Mexico, Spain, and Ukraine, said Jacob S. Sherkow, a professor of law and an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois.
The World Health Organization has explored international governance tools for human genome engineering, but as long as individual countries are allowed to set and enforce their own policies, the possibility of people engaging in medical tourism to other countries to circumvent domestic prohibitions remains a risk, the authors said in a paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“A lot of policymakers and medical practitioners are concerned with some of the genomic editing technologies out there, specifically with technologies that focus on allowing parents to pick and choose their children’s height, eye color, skin tone and the like,” Sherkow said. “Generally speaking, reproductive technologies are somewhat regulated, but U.S. rules are totally different from what they are in Canada, certain EU countries, the United Kingdom or China. And there is no international enforcement agency out there that’s going to stop people from engaging in genetic medical tourism.
“So there isn’t much international harmony on the issue, and it’s just inherently something that’s pretty inimical to an international governance framework. But the gene-editing technology itself is patentable—and that could potentially be an under-the-radar tool to thwart this undesirable behavior.”
There’s already a trend in the U.S. toward patenting human heritable germline-editing technology, Sherkow said. “Patent protection affords researchers and their institutions significant power over the ethical limits of using such technologies,” he said. “For institutions that develop these technologies, it’s essential to build the ethical limits of their intellectual property into the patent licensing process.”
Source: Healthcare in Europe
