The European Court of Justice ruling in Brustle v. Greenpeace: the impacts on patenting of human induced pluripotent stem cells in Europe.

摘要

In Brustle v. Greenpeace, the German Federal Court of Justice asked the Court of the European Union (CJEU) to define what is meant by the term "human embryos" in Article 6(2)(c) of the European Parliament and Council Directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions (European Union, 1998). The Directive considers unpatentable uses of human embryos for industrial or commercial purposes. The question explicitly addressed two techniques to isolate human embryonic stem cells (hESCs): somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) and induced parthenogenesis. Both methods were developed years before induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) were made by direct reprogramming with embryonic transcription factors (Takahashi et al., 2007).