Nature-Rich Nations Push for Biodata Payout
- Author: Lee Harris
- Full Title: Nature-Rich Nations Push for Biodata Payout
- Category: articles
- Document Tags: #planet
- URL: https://www.ft.com/content/f93938da-353f-474b-ae1e-1e2645e26886#myft:notification:daily-email:content
Highlights
- Before the current generation of weight-loss drugs, there was hoodia, a cactus that grows in southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert, and which members of the region’s San tribe have long used to stave off hunger. UK-based Phytopharm licensed the active ingredient in the cactus in 1996, and made numerous attempts to commercialise weight-loss products derived from it. (View Highlight)
- The company won licensing deals with Pfizer and Unilever, but drew outrage from campaigners who argued that the country was ripping off indigenous groups that had made the discovery. Indignation grew after the chief executive said it could not compensate local tribes because “the people who discovered the plant have disappeared”. (They had not). (View Highlight)
- Bringing new urgency to the debate: scientists expect the rise of artificial intelligence to supercharge demand for biodata. AI could launch a new era for the life sciences, with wide-ranging applications in therapeutics, diagnostics and industrial technology. And just as the chatbot ChatGPT was trained on reams of text, AI models will need to be trained on vast quantities of biodata sourced from the world’s plants, animals and microbes. (View Highlight)
- Ultimately, he added, such AI deep-learning tools for biology are “churning through the genetic material that nature has provided”, so the UN fund is about trying to “ensure that there’s more nature there in the future”. (View Highlight)
- Basecamp has built the world’s most diverse database of novel proteins, he said, by compensating partners such as local communities and landowners for the use of their genetic resources.
Why would Basecamp be willing to pay, I asked Gowers, for materials that other biotech firms are able to obtain for free?
“It will no longer be free in the future,” Gowers said, pointing to negotiations over the global biodiversity revenue mechanism. Currently, he said, “we are seeing countries reject requests for academic research because they understand that they’ll see none of the upside should it be commercialised”. (View Highlight)
- As an example, Gowers pointed to an agreement Basecamp announced last week with the government of Cameroon. Four communities in Cameroon have agreed to allow sampling of genetic resources in their areas, Basecamp said. Partnering with Ajesh, a Cameroonian non-profit, Basecamp will train a local team to extract and process samples, the company said, in a programme it hopes will help residents steward biodiversity. (View Highlight)
- If that information is used in commercial scientific research, or if the AI model is trained on Cameroon’s DSI, Basecamp says that Cameroon would receive royalties. (View Highlight)
- Gowers declined to share the agreed royalty rate, but said it was “not wildly different” from the number proposed by African countries in the COP16 process. (View Highlight)