BioMed Analysis: Keep traditional knowledge open but safe

And last month, the European Patent Office (EPO) revoked a patent for a traditional remedy extracted from the roots of endemic South African plants.

Both actions are examples of a growing trend to incorporate traditional knowledge into modern patent applications. They follow agreements — signed last year by the USPTO and the EPO — with India to consult its Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) before granting patents.

According to Samir Brahmachari, director-general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Delhi, it was set up partly in response to two expensive and protracted legal battles in the 1990s over widely used traditional medicines.

In 1995, the USPTO granted a patent to the University of Mississippi Medical Center for the use of turmeric powder as a wound-healing agent. That this was not novel knowledge would have been obvious to anyone travelling through India, where turmeric-doused bandages are commonly used. But it took the Indian government two years to overturn the patent.

Another 1995 patent stood for longer still. It was not until 2000 that a patent for a neem-based fungicide — granted by the EPO to the US Department of Agriculture and the multinational W. R. Grace — was revoked.

Raghunath Mashelkar, who led the fight against the EPO patent as Brahmachari's predecessor, was a key player in setting up the TKDL and explains its significance.

"For the first time, traditional knowledge started to be codified in a language and in systems that the patent offices could use," he says.

Not all developing countries have the resources to fight such wars. And doing so eats into budgets that could otherwise be spent using traditional knowledge to develop new and urgently needed treatments for diseases such as malaria.

Nevertheless, the ability to screen libraries of traditionally used chemical compounds offers much promise that some developing countries are now quick to exploit.

The African Network for Drugs and Diagnostics Innovation, for example, includes the development of new treatments for infectious diseases from traditional medicines as one of its goals. It is pursuing this on its own and in collaboration with initiativessuch as the Global Institute for BioExploration, a global network that is investigating plant-based pharmaceuticals for diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria.

Meanwhile, the Indian Council of Medical Research's Advanced Centre for Reverse Pharmacology in Traditional Medicine, in Mumbai, is undertaking a similar approach to drug discovery, studying for example the antimalarial properties of a type of jasmine known locally as parijat.

Devinder Sharma, chair of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security in New Delhi, told SciDev.Net that "TKDL facilitates biopiracy. With patent applications becoming sophisticated and huge, it is never possible to find out in which cases companies have used the information from TKDL."

Sharma adds that international guidelines and laws should be changed so that "any patent application found to be based on traditional knowledge would attract a penalty and the blacklisting of the company".

Brahmachari disagrees. He points to the success of the open-access consensus for sequencing the human genome as proof that the TKDL will work the way it is intended to.

But ensuring that it does may owe more to the support of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). In a press conference this month, WIPO director-general Francis Gurry called the "sophisticated" TKDL "a model we hope to establish in other countries around the world".

Patents only work because there are consequences from their infringement. As long as open-access traditional knowledge databases have the backing of the 'big guns' in intellectual property — both nationally and internationally — there is a good chance that traditional medicine can be brought into the modern world.