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16 Med. & L. 9 (1997)
Intellectual Property Law in Biotechnology

handle is hein.journals/mlv16 and id is 17 raw text is: Med Law (1997) 16:9-16 Medicine and Law CYOZMOTr 1996 Medical Law INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW IN BIOTECHNOLOGY Dr. Miyako Okada-Takagi, Tokyo Gakuen Women's College, Tokyo, Japan. The ability to secure property interests in technological processes, products and know-how encourages the development of technology. One factor to evaluate the competitiveness in biotechnology is the effectiveness of intellectual property law. The laws relating to the protection of biotechnological inventions and related know-how were compared and contrasted in Japan and the United States. Biotechnology gives rise to a vast array of new inventions. The inventions may be placed into two categories: products and processes. Products include organisms, such as genetically modified micro-organisms, cell lines, plants and possibly even animals. Finally, there are products of organisms, such as drugs, chemicals, monoclonal antibodies. Processes include various ways to make new organisms or to use an organism to make some product. Biotechnology, as defined in this report, focuses on the industrial use of recombinant DNA, cell fusion, and novel bioprocessing techniques. These techniques will find applications across many industrial sectors including pharmaceuticals, plant and animal agriculture, specialty chemicals and food additives, environmental applications, commodity chemicals and energy production and bioelectronics. Competitive advantage in areas related to biotechnology depends as much on developments in bioprocess engineering as on innovations in genetics, immunology, and other areas of basic science. Let us consider the Japanese biotechnological conditions in the companies. Some Japanese companies are very interested in the development of amino acids and high-value compounds by selecting and engineering plant cells to produce secondary metabolites in vat culture. The specialty chemicals industry promises to be a particularly competitive industry as biotechnology develops, because large chemical companies of Japan as well as the United States are hoping to switch from the stagnant commodity chemicals industry into the more profitable specialty chemical industry. Therefore, the general chemical and 9

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