How many gmo patents are there

It currently indicates 7, patents owned by Monsanto, but that number will change on a weekly basis as new patents are issued. Question How many patents do Monsanto have? How many patents does Monsanto have?

Does it really have 11, patents? Related Resources. Question Are we saving money or losing money by using GMOs? This article provides an overview of GMO patents and related litigation to help you understand why. The documentary David versus Monsanto, released in , moved many people.

It tells the story of a Canadian farmer whose land was contaminated by proprietary GMO plants from Monsanto, a big biotechnology company, and was sued by Monsanto for infringement. The Canadian Supreme Court ruled in favor of Monsanto. The documentary and other social media reactions have caused a backlash directed towards the GMO industry, and Monsanto has since become notorious for allegedly abusing legal rights.

What is the truth behind the story? Has the patent system truly become a vehicle for big corporates to monopolize the market? To answer these questions, it is important to understand what is legal under current patent laws. Patent rights on novel inventions are authorized by the US Constitution. The purpose of the patent system is to give inventors a period of exclusivity for commercial development of products, thereby encouraging innovation. But in the long run, the patent rights are not intended to be given at the price of public interest.

Utility and plant patents have a patent term of 20 years from the initial filing, so GMO patents protect a marketed product for about 15 to 20 years after the time of product development see Figure 1. After a patent expires, the invention becomes public knowledge to which other companies, farmers, and other interested parties have free access.

At that time, the GMO can be mass-reproduced and the underlying genetic design can be utilized by anyone to develop improved versions of the GMO. This eventual free access is one way in which GMOs developed by private companies could bring about public benefit see this article and this article. Figure 1. The timeline of typical transgenic GMO patents. In the U. Among the wide spectrum of inventions covered by US patent law, plants are indeed patent-eligible.

As long as one discovers or invents a new plant in a cultivated state and is able to asexually reproduce it, he or she may obtain a patent on the plant. Congress passed the Plant Patent Act in as a result of plant breeding and other agricultural efforts, making new plant strains derived from crossbreeding patentable. Since then, the act has also incorporated plants produced from modern biotechnological methods, such as integration of foreign DNA into plant genomes.

Instead, they obtain utility patents, a different type of patent with more stringent requirements on the description of the invention. Utility patents have several advantages over plant patents. First, utility patents may cover inventions beyond plants. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.

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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Can GMOs be patented? After the patent expires, the GMO will become public knowledge, meaning that it will be accessible to everyone. It can be reproduced on a large scale and other parties can use the underlying genetic design to develop better versions of the GMO.

To compensate for the high costs of research and development, multinational corporations must patent their products to remain profitable and prevent other companies from releasing similar products. GMO companies usually do not obtain plant patents. Instead, they apply for utility patents, which have more stringent criteria on the descriptions of their inventions. Plants that are discovered by chance or developed through crossbreeding often do not meet the requirements, but detailed molecular information of GMOs is usually available.

Overall, utility patents offer better protection for GMOs than plant patents.