ASPB President Daniel Bush commended the Rockefeller Foundation, McKnight Foundation and academic institutions that are participating in the Public Sector Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture (PIPRA) initiative in a letter sent July 7 to ASPB member Deborah Delmer, Associate Director for Food Security at the Rockefeller Foundation.

“PIPRA is addressing the need for cooperative management of Intellectual Property (IP) so that it will be more easily available for work on specialty crops in the U.S. and for work on subsistence crops in the developing world,” Bush said. “At the same time, PIPRA has acknowledged in a discussion paper that potential new approaches to management of intellectual property relating to agricultural biotechnology should not restrict an institution’s ability to benefit from the commercial potential of such technologies. ASPB encourages PIPRA to continue its efforts to bring the tremendous, life-sustaining advances in agricultural biotechnology to hungry people throughout the world and to offer needed help for specialty crop growers here in the U.S.”

On July 11, a letter from presidents of universities, foundations and plant science institutes supporting PIPRA was published in the Policy Forum section of Science magazine. The letter addressed the need for public sector collaboration for agricultural intellectual property management.

“While new technology is judiciously patented, freedom to operate (FTO) can be enhanced if public sector institutions systematically retain rights to use their newest and best technologies for subsistence and specialty crop development when they issue commercial licenses,” supporters of PIPRA wrote in the Science Policy Forum. “It will also require that they systematically make their current and future technologies known and available to each other. We believe a collective management regime would enable an effective assessment of FTO issues and could begin to overcome the fragmentation of public-sector IP rights and re-establish the necessary FTO in agricultural biotechnology for the public good, while at the same time improving private-sector interactions by more efficiently identifying collective commercial licensing opportunities.”

Near-term objectives of PIPRA include:

• A review of public sector patenting and licensing practices
• Developing a common database that provides an overview of IP rights currently held by the public sector, including up-to-date information about licensing statuses
• PIPRA is exploring the possibility of pooling specific public-sector technologies, making technology packages available to member institutions and to the private sector for commercial licensing or at least for designated humanitarian or special use.

Many more universities have expressed interest in PIPRA following the publication of the Policy Forum letter in Science. For example, Iowa State University has already joined as a new participant in the PIPRA initiative. Those who would like to learn more about PIPRA can contact through the ASPB membership directory Deborah Delmer at the Rockefeller Foundation or Rex Raimond at the Meridian Institute, P.O. Box 1829, Dillon, Colorado 80435, phone 970-513-8340 ext. 230, e-mail rraimond@merid.org. Information on PIPRA can also be found at www.pipra.org.