Patent tracker for Ayurveda

An Indian government science agency has established a formal mechanism to track patent claims filed in other countries to guard against India’s traditional knowledge, primarily in medicine, being passed off as innovation. The Global Biopiracy Watch System is a new component of an effort initiated 10 years ago by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research to create a giant database of traditional knowledge contained in the Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha systems of medicine.The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) built over the past decade contains some 2,25,000 formulations based on therapies mentioned in centuries-old texts on traditional medicine — the oldest one from the 8th century AD.Foreign patent examiners are expected to screen this library whenever they encounter patent applications that appear rooted in traditional medicine and to deny patents if there is no innovation. India today signed an agreement with Japan’s patent office to make available the TKDL to Japanese patent examiners, after signing similar pacts with patent offices of Europe, the US, Australia, Canada, Germany and the UK over the past two years.“But foreign patent examiners have limited domain knowledge on traditional medicine,” said Vinod Gupta, the TKDL project head. “In the Global Biopiracy Watch System, we’ll ourselves rely on software to screen patent applications filed in all these countries.”Over the past two years, the TKDL officials have identified 224 patent applications with the European Patents Office (EPO) that are based on traditional knowledge — and successfully blocked 35 patents on herb-based therapies.After receiving an alert from the TKDL, the EPO has set aside its earlier decision to grant patents on two claims. In the other 33 cases, the patent applicants themselves decided to withdraw their applications when confronted with evidence from the TKDL.“We need to find unfair claims before the patents are granted,” Gupta said. After a patent is granted, the only option is litigation which is expensive — it could take anywhere from $2,00,000 to $6,00,000 to oppose each granted patent, he said.Japan hopes to use the TKDL to avoid granting patents on existing knowledge. “We need to respect traditional knowledge as prior art,” said Tomoki Sawai, director of the international affairs division at the Japanese patents office.All of the blocked patent claims so far have related to plant-based therapies — fruit juice pitched as a tonic for the heart, a mixture of spinach and fenugreek to boost the immunity and other extracts of plants to fight stress, diabetes or obesity.Gupta said he expects the TKDL database to grow to contain nearly 350,000 formulations from traditional medicine. The TKDL project has also digitally recorded 1,300 postures and exercises prescribed in various texts of yoga, he said.“There have been attempts in the past to stake copyright or patent claims on yoga exercises, adding some simple equipment to monitor the body’s parameters while the exercise is being performed,” Gupta said.In the 1990s, the CSIR had successfully blocked a patent in the US on the use of turmeric for medicinal purposes. Source:The Telegraph