{"id":1237471,"date":"2025-03-06T10:38:12","date_gmt":"2025-03-06T15:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1237471"},"modified":"2025-03-06T10:38:12","modified_gmt":"2025-03-06T15:38:12","slug":"who-gets-ownership-of-useful-genetic-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1237471","title":{"rendered":"Who gets ownership of useful genetic data?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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C<\/span>ow D lived<\/span> on a dairy farm in New Zealand. The animal looked like the typical black-and-white cow farmers raise for milk, except for one thing: Researchers had outfitted Cow D with an artificial fistula\u2014a hole offering them a way to reach the microbes inhabiting the animal\u2019s bathtub-size stomach. But it\u2019s what happened next that offers a porthole into the global debate over the use of genetic data.<\/p>\n

In the spring of 2009, Samantha Noel, then a doctoral researcher at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, reached into Cow D\u2019s rumen and plucked out a strain of Lachnospiraceae bacterium, later dubbed ND2006. Another team of geneticists sequenced the microbe\u2019s complete set of genes, or genome, and uploaded the information, which was then shared with GenBank, a public database run by the US National Institutes of Health. If genes are the book of life, then this process was like adding a digital copy to an online library. In policy circles, these lines of code go by another name: digital sequence information, or DSI.<\/p>\n

Eventually, a section of the sequence found inside Cow D caught the attention of scientists on the other side of the world. The sequence contained a promising new genetic tool for modifying DNA, a CRISPR. Editas Medicine, a Massachusetts-based company focused on commercializing gene-editing technology for medical applications, used these data to build its platform and now holds the license on a portfolio of patents\u2014all without ever interacting with the cow or its microbes directly. The company subsequently developed an experimental therapy, which involved injecting a modified CRISPR-associated molecule into patients\u2019 eyeballs to treat a common form of inherited blindness. Editas billed the breakthrough as the first such treatment \u201cadministered to people anywhere in the world.\u201d The results, published<\/a> in the New England Journal of Medicine, contain little mention of any sequence data and even less about its origins.<\/p>\n

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Comments<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cow D lived on a dairy farm in New Zealand. The animal looked like the typical black-and-white cow farmers raise for milk, except for one thing: Researchers had outfitted Cow D with an artificial fistula\u2014a hole offering them a way … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,44,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1237471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ars-technica","category-technology","category-unfiltered-rss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1237471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1237471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1237471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1237471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}