UC Riverside has now been issued a US patent on this RNAi vaccine technology
Naturally, you’ll want to patent it so you can profit off it instead of just releasing it to benefit all of humanity. Fucking greedy ass people sometimes…
I do t know UC Riverside’s history for how they manage their patents, but I’m on the side of giving them the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. It’s okay to have a patent. It’s ok to profit off an invention you spent a lot of money producing. But what’s not ok would be upping the price so high that people have to choose dying over getting the product because they simply can’t afford it. Let’s hope UC does the former and not the latter.
Generally these “patented” products from universities are funded via tax payer money. I am not cool with them profiting off something that is intended to save lives and was also funded by the very people who’s lives will be affected.
Putting things behind a patent wall only hinders progress.
Public universities receive funding from a multitude of sources. Research is typically funded by grants, which may come from state or federal sources, but they can also come from alumni, fundraising, or charitable trusts.
Regardless, patents are a necessary part of invention. As others have pointed out, without a patent, what’s to stop some other entity from coming along and (for example) using your hard work to make themselves rich? I’d wager if it were your invention/discovery, you’d want protections too.
There are some entities out there that would easily abuse patents. But I find it hard to believe a public university would be one of them.
A patent also ensures no one else can patent it. If they make it affordable and available they are protected from someone else patenting it and then “profitmaxxing” because they have legal recourse to prevent that.
That’s in fact why some universities patent their research stuff in the first place, to ensure nobody else can. They’ll then make it a policy to take 0€ in licensing fees, but this precludes anybody else from starting to lock the tech behind money.
Source: My uni back in the days had a few dozen patents for exactly this reason, too.
IANAL but patents rely on originality, meaning a preprint of the original paper is basically enough to make the technology impossible to patent. Well probably more than just the paper I guess.
I learned it too that it has to be “new”. Most likely it is a hell of a lot easier to directly patent it and have a strong legal foundation than just wait around and scramble for proof if it needs to be. Probably also helps being picked up by the industry.
It’s a fucking nonprofit. Without the royalty stream, shit like this can only be discovered, developed, and brought to market by big pharma. Then what happens?
That’s not how patents work. They have to guard it or else someone else will. You don’t know the university’s goals yet, but you would know the goal of a for profit pharma company.
Just because it’s patented doesn’t mean it can’t still be released for the benefit of humanity. It does mean it will be harder for some for-profit entity to claim the process for themselves. This may be naive, but I feel like a public (state-owned) nonprofit research university will be a better steward for the patent than a private entity that’s seeking to maximize shareholder value. I would expect that they would either license the patent freely for humanitarian benefit or at a reasonable cost to support the university’s ongoing research efforts.
"Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised. "
Paper says
“Live-attenuated virus vaccine defective in RNAi suppression induces rapid protection in neonatal and adult mice lacking mature B and T cells”
I love how they probably used chatgpt to summarize the article for their website. And jumping from here to saying “this vaccine is effective against everything ever” seems a bit! over reaching. Even universal vaccines within a given subtype are finicky. There seems to be a trade off between universality (of recognition) and of effectiveness. Nevertheless this seems like a different mechanism than previous RNA/protein vaccines in that it seems to work by inducing innate immunity. Even though they say that mice remain immune 90d post vaccination, that is another area where mice and men can be substantially different, so I think we are still at the wait and see stage unfortunately.
And this joke of a sentence here
"With one vaccine injection, they found the mice were protected from a lethal dose of the unmodified virus for at least 90 days. Note that some studies show nine mouse days are roughly equivalent to one human year. "
If you want to search for it yourself it’s “Live-attenuated virus vaccine defective in RNAi suppression induces rapid protection in neonatal and adult mice lacking mature B and T cells” by Gang Chen, Qingxia Han, Wan-Xiang Li, and Shou-Wei Ding
In medicine, finding out what doesn’t work is nearly as valuable as finding what does. Because finding out why it doesn’t work can lead to you the solution and perhaps even solutions for things you weren’t even looking for.
finding out what doesn’t work is nearly as valuable as finding what does
Sometimes, sure. Most of the time, though, it’s more akin to: “Worked on isolated cells in vitro, but doesn’t approach target cells in vivo due to ECM.”
Add comment