Clause 1 - Methods of treatment or diagnosis
Patents Bill
10:30 am
Mr Gerry Sutcliffe (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Employment Relations, Competition and Consumers), Department of Trade and Industry; Bradford South, Labour)
We have had a short but important debate. I am grateful for the way in which the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare moved his amendment. He will not be surprised by the comments of the right hon. Member for North-East Hampshire and my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West
on the mechanisms. The hon. Members for Weston-super-Mare and for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce) are clearly concerned about the scope of gene patenting and want to amend clause 1 as a result.
It is important to set out what the clause does and does not do. It inserts a new section 4A into the Patents Act 1977 that brings together all the provisions that concern the patentability of methods of treatment and methods of diagnosis, and substances or compositions used in those methods. Subsection (1) makes clear the important fact that such medical methods cannot be patented; that includes medical methods that are biotechnological in nature or that flow from gene-based research. Subsections (2) to (4) relate to substances or compositions that are found to have a use in such a medical method. Those substances or compositions have already been susceptible to patent protection but, as I mentioned on Second Reading, the new provisions avoid the need to use a rather specialised and complex form of wording when obtaining such patent protection. The provisions do not open up patent protection into areas where none was previously available. That applies equally to biotechnological substances or compositions.
Having given those reassurances, I now turn to the area of gene patenting more generally. Our law in this area is governed by the European directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions, which was adopted in 1998 and implemented in the UK in 2000. It makes it very clear that neither DNA nor the raw information from the human genome project can be patented. That is because those are discoveries, not inventions. What can be patented, but only under certain circumstances, is genetic material that has been isolated from its natural environment. Those circumstances are where the isolation process is an inventive one that involves a new and technical solution. To put that another way, the directive—and therefore UK law—makes it clear that gene-based inventions will only be patentable if they meet all the usual criteria for any other invention. The invention must be more than just a discovery; it must be new and not obvious in the light of what has gone before, and it must provide a solution to a technical problem.
I am confident that we have in place with our European Union partners, a system that allows those who take important steps forward in this field to obtain patent protection without allowing patents to be taken out on the fundamental discoveries surrounding naturally occurring genetic material. We will continue to work with our European Union partners to ensure that the patent system achieves the right balance in this complex and exciting field, for the public good.
I hope that what I have said is of reassurance. However, if it is not, I hope that what my noble Friend the Minister for Science and Innovation said on 7 June will help. In response to the report by the House of Lords Select Committee on Genetic Databases, he said that we had promised to investigate the impact of UK law on the patenting of genetic sequences. He made it clear that the Government welcomed the findings of the resulting study carried out by the Intellectual
Property Institute on behalf of the Department of Trade and Industry, and that we would look at ways to take forward the issues raised by the report. The Government welcomed the report's main finding—that current law and practice is meeting the needs of both the public and private sectors in this field.
I hope that hon. Members will draw further comfort from that recent statement. It is an example of us keeping the commitment to get the balance right. I hope that, with those words of reassurance and comfort from my noble Friend and me, the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare will withdraw his amendment.