HARNESSING AND SHARING THE BENEFITS OF STATE-SPONSORED RESEARCH: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND DATA SHARING IN CALIFORNIA'S STEM CELL INITIATIVE

摘要

Proposition 71 calls upon CIRM to balance a number of competing interests, including not only scientific progress but also commercialization of research results and financial returns to the State of California. In the context of patenting, licensing, and tangible research materials, CIRM has enunciated a detailed plan for balancing these competing interests. With respect to the important issue of data sharing, however, the balance that CIRM aims to strike is less clear. Data sharing represents a significant opportunity for a show of leadership. The federal example binds CIRM less directly in the area of data sharing than it does in the area of patents and licensing. At the same time, because data sharing has been a prominent and recurrent source of tension in the global biomedical research community, CIRM has a rieh history outside the state of California upon which to draw. Prior experience with data sharing in federally-funded research and multinational research efforts, such as the HGP and the HapMap Project, offers both instructive examples and cautionary tales. Achieving CIRM's multiple goals will require considerable creativity. However, if the CIRM data sharing experiment works successfully, aspects of its policy may serve as a model for other states or even for the federal government.