Open Source Biological Technologies
CambiaLabs engineered two ‘open source’ biological technologies, TransBacter and GUSPlus, which they released under the BiOS Initiative. The first, TransBacter, was designed to work around the intense patenting associated with the making of transgenic plants. Cambia identified that the majority of patents claiming methods for plant transgenics make explicit reference to the bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens; therefore, the use of a bacterium outside the genus Agrobacterium would not be subject to existing patent claims. Cambia published its work on TransBacter, which uses bacteria from the genera Rhizobium, Sinorhizobium and Mesorhizobium in 2005 in Nature. TransBacter is available to all non-profit researchers and institutes upon signing a BiOS MTA. For-profit companies are asked to sign a BiOS license and to make a contribution to Cambia which is calculated on the company’s financial means.
An inventory of BiOS-licensed patents is available at the Cambia site.
Read more about this topic: Biological Innovation For Open Society
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