Monsanto Wants Patents on Corn ESTs

Monsanto is waiting on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to decide if it can apply for US patent protection on five expressed sequence tags or ESTs from corn.

The agriculture company has twice been rejected on patent applications on these and in May decided to ask the court to decide the issue.

Affymetrix, Genentech, Eli Lilly and Dow AgroSciences as well as the National Academy of Sciences and the Association of Medical Colleges have weighed in against Monsanto.

If granted, this type of IP protection might, of course, slow down research and innovation, as the patent office has previously refused to grant patents on this information and says, according to an article by Anna Salleh of ABC Science Online, has not identified any “specific and practical benefit for using the ESTs, in particular the function of the particular genes and proteins they point to.”