Team:Harvard/Human Practices

A Case Study in Intellectual Property

The History of IP and Open-Source in Zinc Finger Technology

Discovered in 1985, zinc finger proteins have rapidly become a staple of gene therapy innovation. A cascade of research has transformed our understanding of the zinc finger domain from a natural transcription factor to a tool for highly specific genome alteration. As the zinc finger motif was domesticated and fused to DNA cleaving domains, its practical application to gene therapy through targeted gene alteration was realized. Seeking to harness zinc finger potential, researchers and entrepreneurs collaborated to form Sangamo Biosciences in 1995, which emerged as the sole commercial provider of the protein. Today, the Sangamo monopoly raises a variety difficult ethical and economic questions about intellectual property within the zinc finger field, and synthetic biology as a whole. As an open-source alternative to Sangamo’s proprietary system and commercial dominance, Keith Joung and others have published the OPEN system of zinc finger creation. However, while the OPEN system and subsequent improvements are promising for massive zinc finger production, the methods are difficult and time-consuming to implement, and gaps remain in the list of available DNA binding targets.

Harvard iGEM and Human Practices

Where does our project stand in this complex and contentious history?

The objective of our project was to provide an open-source, "reduced-to-practice" method for zinc finger production through the novel application and integration of technologies. This method allows for the rapid creation of custom zinc fingers in a high-volume fashion for targeting novel binding sequences. This, in turn, has enabled us to fill gaps of undiscovered zinc finger binders in the OPEN and CoDA database and other open-source zinc finger databases. Most importantly, our open-source BioBrick materials and detailed protocols greatly increase the accessibility of zinc finger technology: our foundational advance helps to overcome the prohibitively high price tags of the present market. We aim to increase the accessibility of our method, which can in turn be applied by others to the generation of novel biological interactions beyond zinc fingers. We wish to share our data and results with the community, highlighting our successes and failures to collectively advance our knowledge of designing novel biological interactions. In addition, in our human practices we seek to open address pertinent ethical and legal concerns surrounding the impact of intellectual property in synthetic biology, and to open a dialogue to raise awareness about these issues.