Canberra, Australia and Los Baños,
the Philippines
December 7, 2005
CAMBIA and The International
Rice Research Institute (IRRI) today announced a major joint
venture to advance the BiOS
Initiative - a new strategy that will galvanize agricultural
research focused on poverty alleviation and hunger reduction.
The venture is catalyzed by a 2.55M USD grant to CAMBIA from The
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway.
The BiOS Initiative – Biological
Innovation for Open Society- is often called Open Source
Biotechnology. The BiOS model has resonance with the Open Source
software movement, famous for such successful efforts as Linux.
Open Source software has spurred faster innovation, greater
community participation, and new robust business
models that break monopolies and foster fair competition. BiOS
targets parallel challenges that limit the effective use of
modern life sciences in agriculture to only a few multinational
corporations.
“New technologies are increasingly
tangled in complex webs of patent and other legal rights, and
are usually tailored for wealthy countries and well-heeled
scientists,” said IRRI’s Director General, Robert Zeigler. “Half
the world depends on rice as a staple food – but this also means
half the world’s potential innovators could be brought to bear
on the challenges of rice production, given the right toolkits –
and the rights to use them”.
In the joint work, CAMBIA’s
Patent Lens, already one
of the most comprehensive costfree full-text patent databases in
the world, will be extended to include patents in major
rice-growing countries, including China, Korea, and India. These
same countries are growing powerhouses of innovation, poised to
play lead roles in the next generation of biological problem
solving.
The Patent Lens will also develop
analyses and foster the capacity in the developing world to
create patent maps of the key emerging technologies that could
be constrained by complex intellectual property rights
worldwide, including the rice genome itself. These patent
‘landscapes’ will be used to guide the development of improved
technology toolkits in a new, inclusive manner.
Says Richard Jefferson, CAMBIA’s
CEO, “It’s not so much about getting access to old patented
technology – it’s about forging collaborations to develop
better, more powerful tools within a ‘protected commons’ to get
different problem solvers to the table.” These could for example
be tools for precise, natural genetic enhancements, using non-GM
approaches (for example, homologous recombination), new plant
breeding methods such as marker assisted selection, or even true
breeding hybrids of crop species that would allow farmers in
developing countries to use hybrid seed year after year.
Adds Jefferson, “Scientists and
farmers need better options for problem solving, that meet their
priorities, work within their constraints, build on their
ingenuity, and maintain their independence; this is what BiOS is
all about.”
IRRI, an autonomous international
institute based in Los Banos, The Philippines, is one of the
foundation institutions of the CGIAR (Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research), and is dedicated to
improving the lives and livelihoods of resource poor rice
producers and consumers worldwide.
IRRI has been at the forefront of
rice research for almost thirty years, delivering new rice
varieties and practices to rice farmers throughout Asia and the
developing world. Now, rice has become the model system for
grain crops worldwide, with its entire DNA sequence known; but
the ‘mining’ – and patenting - of this genetic resource and the
possibility that the tools to improve it could be restricted by
broad patents has raised legitimate concerns that must be met
head-on.
CAMBIA, based in Canberra
Australia, is an independent non-profit institute that invents
and shares enabling technologies and new practices for life
sciences and intellectual property management to further social
equity.
CAMBIA is the founder of the BiOS
Initiative, the Patent
Lens and the online collaboration platform
BioForge. CAMBIA published the first explicit ‘open
source’ biotechnology toolkit in the Journal “Nature” in
February 2005. Included in that publication was the technology
‘TransBacter’ in which the technique of plant gene transfer by
Agrobacterium, covered by hundreds of patents, was bypassed
using other symbiotic bacteria to add beneficial genes to rice
and other plants. This and other technologies have been made
freely available under BiOS licenses.
Work by IRRI, CAMBIA scientists,
and others in an online collaboration community, will optimize
this process and other open source enabling technologies,
ensuring their availability to scientists throughout the
developed and developing world. |