On 20th April 2023, the PatentsInHumans team were delighted to host a public launch event for the European Research Council PatentsInHumans project at Maynooth University.
Dr Fergus Ryan (Head of the School of Law and Criminology) commenced the event by offering a welcome address to attendees and introductory remarks on the evening. Following this, Professor Aisling McMahon introduced the PatentsInHumans project and outlining the issues to be explored by the project and its central aim which focuses on examining the bioethical issues posed by patents on technologies related to the human body and how to better engage with these within patent decision-making. Professor Susi Geiger (Full Professor Of Marketing, School of Business, UCD) and Dr Christine Kelly (Honorary Clinical Lecturer/Assistant Professor, School of Medicine, UCD) were then invited to deliver talks which provided reflections on the potential bioethical issues posed by patents based on insights from their respective fields, of health care markets and clinical public health medicine respectively. Professor Susi Geiger discussed the potential impact of patents on supply chains particularly, around access to vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic, and reflections for future pandemics. Whilst Dr Christine Kelly reflected upon her experience as a public health clinician discussed the impact that patents can have on healthcare provisions and access/delivery of vaccines and other health care treatments.
In the second half of the event, Professor Jorge Contreras delivered a keynote lecture on “The Civil Rights Case Against Gene Patents in America” which focused on insights from his recent book, The Genome Defence: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine who owns your DNA (NY:Hachette/Algonquin, 2021). Professor Contreras is the James T. Jensen Endowed Professor for Transactional Law and Director of the Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Human Genetics, University of Utah School of Medicine. During 2023, he is serving as a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
A full report of the launch event will be published on the PatentsInHumans website in the coming weeks, you will find this at: www.patentsinhumans.eu. We are very grateful to the School of Law and Criminology for its support for this event, and to the ALL Institute where the project is co-hosted alongside the School of Law and Criminology.
You can find out more about the PatentsInHumans project by visiting the project website: www.patentsinhumans.eu or by watching this short video here.
