MouseWIKIMEDIA COMMONS, RAMA

Last week (August 9) the Alzheimer’s Institute of America (AIA) dropped its lawsuit against the Jackson Laboratory of Bar Harbor, Maine, for patent infringement in the distribution of transgenic mouse models of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, reports Nature.

The AIA, based in St. Louis, Missouri, first filed suit against the Jackson Laboratory and several other institutes and companies in February 2010. As the patent holder for the so-called Swedish mutation, which causes the disease in mice, the AIA allows non-profit research on its mouse models, but was concerned that the Jackson Laboratory was profiting from their sale of 22 mouse models--a patent infringement, Nature reported. In December, the Jackson Laboratory requested help from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) because much of its work to distribute the Alzheimer’s mouse models to researchers is federally funded.

Last month (June 17), the NIH responded to Jackson Laboratory’s...

"So much Alzheimer's research depends on the transgenic mice that express this mutation," Rudolph Tanzi, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Nature. “I think you need to respect people's intellectual property, but the impact on field if the mice were not freely available would be devastating.”

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