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Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 25, 2006; Page A07
President Bush does not consider stem cell research using human embryos to be murder, the White House said yesterday, reversing its description of his position just days after he vetoed legislation to lift federal funding restrictions on the hotly disputed area of study.
But polls show that most Americans see such research as a potential key to treating Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injuries and other afflictions.
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The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica, Calif., and the Public Patent Foundation in New York filed a request Tuesday with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office asking it to overturn three important patents on embryonic stem cells awarded to James A. Thomson. The University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist first isolated stem cells from human embryos in 1998.
WARF, the university's patenting and licensing arm, holds the broadly worded patents. In its 80 years, the foundation has amassed a $1.5 billion endowment and guided discoveries such as vitamin D and the widely used blood-thinning drug known as coumadin to the market.
But the embryonic stem cell patents are impeding scientific progress and forcing companies to locate overseas to avoid WARF's "draconian" licensing terms, said Dan Ravicher, an attorney with the New York foundation, which he said was founded in 2003 to "remove the pollution from the patent system."
Invitrogen Corp. of Carlsbad, Calif., said recently that it is locating its stem-cell research in Asia to avoid the WARF patents.
"Patents are like guns," Ravicher said. "A gun in the hand of a police officer is a good thing; a gun in the hand of a madman is a bad thing."
Although he wouldn't call WARF a "madman," he said, the technology transfer organization is harming science and California taxpayers and causing public harm by failing to "stand up and admit they got something they didn't deserve."
Researchers and others in California are getting more interested in the WARF patents as the money from Proposition 71 - the initiative that California voters passed in November to create the nation's largest stem cell research fund - begins to get allocated. Proponents of the initiative have estimated that the resulting research could produce therapies that bring in $4 billion of yearly revenue within 10 years.
In the pharmaceutical arena, royalties on basic patents typically are 2% to 5% of product revenue, which would mean those estimates could translate into as much as $200 million a year in royalties for WARF, Balbus said.
Frenchick said the patent office will give WARF a chance to respond to the challenge, and that its patents will be presumed valid while the patent office evaluates the request.