Review article An intellectual property sharing initiative in agricultural biotechnology: development of broadly accessible technologies for plant transformation Cecilia L. Chi-Ham, Sara Boettiger † , Rosa Figueroa-Balderas, Sara Bird à , Josef N. Geoola § , Pablo Zamora, Monica Alandete-Saez and Alan B. Bennett * Department of Plant Sciences, Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture, University of California, Davis, CA, USA Received 23 May 2011; revised 10 November 2011; accepted 18 November 2011. * Correspondence (Tel 530 752 1411; fax 530 752 2278; email abbennett@ucdavis.edu) † Current address: Department of Agricul- tural and Resource Economics, University of California, Giannini Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. à Current address: Department of Microbi- ology and Immunology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. § Current address: Global Alliance for Live- stock Veterinary Medicines, Doherty Build- ing, Pentlands Science Park, Bush Loan, Edinburgh, EH26 0PZ, UK. NCBI Sequences: GenBank JF811681, JF811682, JF811683. Keywords: patent, FTO, plant trans- formation, licensing, regulatory, translational research. Summary The Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture (PIPRA) was founded in 2004 by the Rockefeller Foundation in response to concerns that public investments in agricultural biotech- nology benefiting developing countries were facing delays, high transaction costs and lack of access to important technologies due to intellectual property right (IPR) issues. From its incep- tion, PIPRA has worked broadly to support a wide range of research in the public sector, in specialty and minor acreage crops as well as crops important to food security in developing countries. In this paper, we review PIPRA’s work, discussing the failures, successes, and les- sons learned during its years of operation. To address public sector’s limited freedom-to-oper- ate, or legal access to third-party rights, in the area of plant transformation, we describe PIPRA’s patent ‘pool’ approach to develop open-access technologies for plant transformation which consolidate patent and tangible property rights in marker-free vector systems. The plant transformation system has been licensed and deployed for both commercial and humanitarian applications in the United States (US) and Africa, respectively. Introduction Scientific advances in agriculture have been historically treated as public goods. Universities and other public-sector institutions were leaders in developing improved crop varieties that were transferred to farms through cooperative extension services in the US or equivalent organizations internationally (Conway and Toenniessen). However, this model has changed rapidly in the last few decades due to greater utilization of formal intellectual property (IP) protection of agricultural advances by the public sector, as well as the development of a research-intensive pri- vate sector that now makes major contributions in enhancing the productivity of US agriculture (Kowalski et al., 2002). The growth in patents related to agricultural biotechnology, in par- ticular, has been on the rise since about 1980, and both private companies and public research institutions, most notably the land grant universities, have contributed to the increasing use of formal IP protection to support the translation of basic research into products. Several changes in the legal and policy framework greatly expanded the possibility of patenting and licensing biotechnology inventions over the last 20 years. For example, in 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act was passed which encour- aged US universities to patent their innovations and license them to private sector companies to encourage their commer- cial use (Bennett and Boettiger, 2009). For scientists, the relevance of IP during the research and development process may vary by jurisdiction depending on the research-use laws in each country. Research-use or safe harbour exemption refers to the legal right to use a proprietary technol- ogy in noncommercial research. The scope and degree of clarity in the law with regard to research-use (or safe harbour) defence is highly debated, often ill-defined and inconsistent across juris- dictions (McBratney et al., 2004). As a result, academics often assume the use of patented technologies in exploratory research is immune from infringement. The research exemption tends to be more liberal in some parts of the world, like Europe, where research-use exemptions are often embedded in the law. In Canada, statute provides an exemption for reasonable use dur- ing development and regulatory approval. Research-use defence still remains uncertain for Australian researchers because of the lack of case law or statutory exemption. In contrast, in the US, the landmark Madey v. Duke University case practically invali- dated any sense of a safe harbour exemption for university researchers, although in practice US Universities are rarely a tar- ª 2012 The Authors Plant Biotechnology Journal ª 2012 Society for Experimental Biology, Association of Applied Biologists and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 Plant Biotechnology Journal (2012), pp. 1–10 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7652.2011.00674.x