Access and Benefit Sharing and Digital Sequence Information: Unravelling the Knot

Scientific and technological advances in recent decades have significantly altered the nature of bio-based research and development (R&D). The rise of genomics, i.e. the study and editing of entire genomes rather than individual genes, has been accompanied by the birth of bioinformatics, which develops and uses methods and software tools to extract knowledge from biological material. Enabled by advances in computing power and tools that can generate and analyse large quantities of genotypic, phenotypic and environmental data, these developments have allowed for a ‘tsunami of genomic information being generated … [with] the potential to be shared with any other laboratory in real time’. Research on sequence data arising from biological and genetic resources has thus taken place alongside research on physical samples of such resources for several decades already. The normative and regulatory frameworks governing them, however, have developed in parallel and largely ignoring each other, alongside a third one: The intellectual property frameworks.