Dr. Philip H. Schwartz spent six years providing university researchers with neural stem cells cultured by a method he had helped invent at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.
He figured this was a win-win. His technique provided biomedical scientists with live tissue, an improvement over the dead cells, harvested from the brains of deceased patients, that had been the standard fare. Science marched ahead, bringing novel neurological applications closer to reality. The principles of wide dissemination of knowledge and scientific collaboration were served.
Then his employer, Children's Hospital of Orange County, got a letter from Palo Alto-based StemCells Inc. The firm warned that Schwartz's program infringed its patents in the neural stem cell field and it wished to, er, discuss a licensing arrangement.
The hospital's lawyers advised Schwartz to stop sending out cells until they could make a deal with the company.
That was two years ago. There's still no licensing deal, and there haven't even been talks for more than a year.
"The long and the short of it," Schwartz told me last week, "is that I'm dead in the water."
On the surface, there shouldn't be a huge obstacle to a deal between StemCells and CHOC.
Both say they're open to an agreement. There isn't much overlap among their core clienteles: The company "is not in the business of selling cells to researchers" in basic science, according to its general counsel, Ken Stratton. Conversely, CHOC's Children's Research Institute is interested in supporting only "academic noncommercial researchers," says its director, Brent A. Dethlefs.
But in the biotech world, where millions or even billions of dollars in profits beckon to those who can assert ownership of important discoveries, good intentions and purely scientific goals don't matter like they used to. Access by basic researchers to the essential building blocks of biomedical advances has been shrinking for years, thanks to a land rush by entrepreneurs wielding patent portfolios.
As the conflict between CHOC and StemCells suggests, the penetration of private investment concerns into what used to be largely academic pastures threatens to hobble, rather than hasten, the march of science. The harvest may be secrecy, delay and the directing of research only toward developments that promise quick financial returns.
