Business News Agency February 9th The medical field is a special technical field, and medicine is a special commodity. Since the research, development, production, management, and supervision of pharmaceuticals are related to the national economy and the people's livelihood, the intellectual property protection of pharmaceutical inventions is closely related to the research, development and production of pharmaceuticals. Therefore, all countries attach great importance to intellectual property protection in this field. Especially after China's accession to the WTO, with the rapid development of biotechnology and the human genome project and the arrival of the knowledge economy, the pharmaceutical industry has presented unprecedented opportunities and challenges.

The pharmaceutical industry is highly dependent on intellectual property and patent protection

Overall, the invention of inventions in the medical field is very large. According to the statistics of the American Pharmaceutical Association, the development of a chemical new drug in the world requires an investment of about 800 million to 1 billion U.S. dollars; moreover, the cost for research and development of pharmaceutical companies has increased to 15% to 20% of their sales. The proportion is more than 3 times that of other chemical industries, and it is much higher than the general technical field.

The difficulty of medical invention is also a major feature of the field. The research and development of new drugs is a technically difficult job. Taking only the screening of pharmaceutical compounds as an example, only about five out of 4000 already synthesized and drug-active compounds can be screened out for clinical trials, and only one can eventually become a product. Therefore, most countries that are underdeveloped in the pharmaceutical industry do not have such screening tools and models, and are therefore unable to create new drugs, but rely mainly on importing or copying drugs created by others.

The creation of a new drug, from the synthesis, screening, efficacy and toxicity tests of drug compounds, animal tests to various clinical trials, to the final approval of the market, has to go through many stages, and its time can often reach more than 10 years. Since medicines are a necessity for human health, any country or nation has a demand, and its market is very broad. Some of the more influential drugs, such as penicillin, can even be found throughout the world. Since medicines involve the national economy and the people’s livelihood, and directly affect people’s lives and lives, the significance is very significant. In extreme cases, such as when the plague spreads, major drug discovery can even affect the entire nation’s survival.

Therefore, it can be said that the medical field is one of the technical areas with the highest degree of dependence on intellectual property protection, especially patent protection. After studying and analyzing, the famous American economist Mansfield concluded that without patent protection, 60% of drug inventions cannot be studied and 65% will not be used.

The development of biotechnology and the intellectual property system are inseparable

With the implementation of the Human Genome Project, especially since the release of the human genome sequencing was basically completed on June 26, 2000, biotechnology has become a hot topic of special concern to the world and society as a whole, and the development of the biological industry has caused many The national government attaches great importance.

In recent years, modern biotechnology has achieved rapid development. First of all, in agriculture, transgenic rice, wheat, corn, potatoes, cotton, soybeans, rapeseed and other transgenic plants have appeared one after another since 1983, when genetically modified tobacco and potatoes were first introduced, and they have been planted in large areas. More than 120 genetically modified plants are now available. plant. Secondly, transgenic animals such as transgenic mice, transgenic fish, transgenic pigs, transgenic cows and transgenic chickens have been cloned one after another, especially the transgenic sheep “Dolly”, “Yuanyuan”, “Yangyang”, “Huanhuan” and “Qing”. The emergence of "Celebration" brought the cloning technology to a new level. At present, the number of papers and patents related to biological sciences and biotechnology have accounted for 30% of the total.

The commercial value of biotechnology, especially genetic engineering, is concentrated in the biopharmaceutical industry. The focus of biopharmaceuticals is focused on finding disease-related genes. It can be said that a gene can make a company, even an industry, and its business value is in thousands. Millions of dollars. A patent for a disease-related gene with an important function, the value of the transfer is generally measured in millions of dollars, and the annual sales of the gene drug developed with it can be as high as billions of dollars. As the gene is a limited resource and its commercial value is so high, there has been a "war for genes" in the field. Some developed countries and multinational corporations compete for poaching against developing countries, seeking valuable disease families and patients in developing countries in order to obtain and clone the genes of related diseases, compete for patents, and then develop gene drugs to occupy. The pharmaceutical market, including developed countries and developing countries, has obtained high profits from it.

The rapid development of biotechnology is causing more and more difficult issues such as law, politics, economy, religion, social ethics and ethics. For example, can we grant patent rights to human genes? Is the gene a scientific discovery? Should stem cell research be encouraged? Can gene therapy be granted patents? Can transgenic animal plants be patented? How to prevent the abuse of cloning technology? How to deal with possible genetic discrimination? Is GM food safe? Biotechnology will not affect the ecological balance and cause environmental pollution? All these problems need to be solved in a timely and effective manner so as to prevent modern biotechnology from triggering social unrest and becoming a human disaster.

It can thus be seen that the development of biotechnology is also inseparable from the intellectual property system. Without an active and effective intellectual property system as a support, the national biotechnology research and the development of the bio-industry will be lagging behind; without careful intellectual property control policies and strict management measures, there will be a “scratching” type of chaos development. Order may even have the negative effect of causing social unrest.