Web bounty hunters chase research patients
Nature Medicine, June 2001 Volume 7 Number 6 p 646
Kathleen McGowan
New York
A Massachusetts dot-com has taken on the role of Indiana
Jones in the jungles of high-tech patent law. BountyQuest, a new
Internet site that trades hard-to-find intellectual property
information for quick rewards has set up an online "most
wanted" board that has attracted a worldwide network of sleuths
by offering bounties in exchange for damaging dirt on biotech
and software patents.
Since its launch last fall, BountyQuest has posted several dozen
rewards for 'prior art', as it is known, on patented biotech
inventions, ranging from pharmaceutical treatments for erectile
dysfunction to a method for the overexpression of human
-galactosidase A in mammalian cells. Many of the information
seekers are looking to avoid licensing fees or shoot down a
patent infringement case, and don't want to pay the tens or
hundreds of thousands of dollars that a good attorney might
charge for a prior art search.
The latest target is California-based Incyte Genomics, whose
relational database patent was undermined by BountyQuest last
month. In response to an anonymous offer of a $10,000 bounty,
German graduate student Holger Blasum tracked down
evidence that seems to invalidate one of Incyte's 10 genomic
database patents. The patent was filed in 1997, but Blasum, a
computer scientist with a background in molecular biology,
realized that most genomic database development projects in
the mid-1990s were collaborative.
After a quick literature search, Blasum found two journal articles
on the same subjects from 1993 and 1994, and submitted them
to the website. "It seemed easy enough to do, and because I
have some understanding of the patent system I know there are
lots of bogus patents," says Blasum. "This was obviously one of
the very weak ones."
According to BountyQuest's patent attorney, this evidence of
prior art poses as a serious challenge to Incyte's proprietary
claim on the technology. But Incyte general counsel Lee
Bendekgey says that no legal tussles or licensing agreements
are currently pending with regard to the database in question,
and as a result, Blasum's discovery will not have any immediate
impact. "We still don't know what this means for the patent in
question," says Bendekgey. "We may end up sending it back to
the [United States] Patent and Trademark Office and asking
them to re-examine the patent to see if they think we are still
entitled to it. We don't want to be a company that people think of
as having or trying to get invalid patents, so if this invalidates our
patent I would just as soon know about it."
Either way, Blasum gets $10,000 for his work, a quarter of
which he intends to donate to a European anti-patent
organization. And there are apparently no hard feelings on
Incyte's part. In fact, Bendekgey says he wouldn't rule out using
the service himself. "For $10,000, you can have the whole world
looking for prior art for you," he laughs. "It's a pretty cheap way
to find out."
Category: 18. Value of Patents, 19. General Patent and Biotechnology Information