When a pharmaceutical product goes off-patent, within days the market is flooded with biosimilars (generics) that bring prices down and drive opportunities for innovators to enter markets. Why doesn’t the same happen for seeds when their patents expire?
One of the challenges for seed innovators is that the regulatory hurdles are so severe that it limits authorizations to large companies with the deep pockets to manage the demands of the process. Thus, they only file patents for commodity seeds that will provide a significant return on investment given the cost burdens of putting a modified seed on the market. Smaller seed companies don’t stand a chance […]
What is needed is a seed patent reform that will encourage and reward innovative seed research, bring prices down for old technologies and create certainty in markets (determined by regulators rather than judges). Ideally this reform would need to reduce the time to market for generic seeds, set limits on IP holders using new data to extend the data restriction periods and take into account the variety of [gene-editing] innovations.
Share this article
