The Intellectual Property - Regulatory Complex ─ Overcoming Barriers to Innovation in Agricultural Genomics

Advances in agricultural genomics could help address pressing global issues such as world hunger. However, overlapping and inconsistent intellectual property and biosafety regimes – collectively referred to as the "intellectual property-regulatory complex" – create significant, and often conflicting, barriers to developing and commercializing new agricultural biotechnology. The authors of this collection explore how this complex impacts innovation in ways that cannot be appreciated when individual regimes are examined in isolation. They then propose solutions that would meet the objectives of the current intellectual property and biosafety regimes while enabling innovation in the field of agricultural genomics.

Emily Marden is counsel to Sidley Austin LLP, a food and drug regulatory practice in Palo Alto, California, and a research associate in the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia.Rachael Manion is a senior associate at a public policy consulting firm based in Ottawa, Canada, which serves the health and life sciences sectors.R. Nelson Godfrey is an associate at the Vancouver offices of a Canadian intellectual property and technology law firm whose practice includes advising clients on litigation, compliance and regulatory matters, and licencing transactions. Contributors: Vernon Bachor, Hannes Dempewolf, Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss, Regiane Garcia, Gregory Graff, Jeremy Hall, Sarah Hartley, Ronald J. Herring, Stelvia Matos, Chidi Oguamanam, Loren H. Rieseberg, Matthew R. Voell, and David Zilberman