Towards digitisation of Biological Licensing restrictions

Owned by Becky Upton
Last updated: May 16, 2021
1 min read

Contact for more details

@Becky Upton @Mark Livingstone (Unlicensed)

The innovation team: projectenquiries@pistoiaalliance.org

Problem Statement

  • Commercially purchased biological reagents come with a variety of restrictions, including Nagoya Protocol restrictions, usage limits, shipping restrictions, etc.

  • Scientists have difficulty finding & understanding these restrictions, resulting in slower lab work + higher risk of non-compliance.

  • We imagine this problem is similar across Pharmaceutical companies – small “cottage industries” in each company must analyze bio-licensing restrictions on a case-by-case basis.

 

Questions to ask?

Can we create a Pistoia Alliance project to define a finite set of fields that could represent in a human- and machine-readable format such licensing terms and conditions? What is the optimal mechanism to translate terms and conditions to this human- and machine-readable set of data fields: supplier populated, natural language processing, other?

Could we work on best practices for translating licensing restrictions for biological research tools (cell lines, transgenic animals, microbes, plasmids) into internal databases/systems to ensure licensing compliance and maintain visibility for decision-making?