Immunocompetent

While the effort to prevent piracy of WHO Global Influenza Surveillance Network materials has (with good reason) so far mainly focused on viruses and their genes, there are other kinds of theft that will need to be confronted.

Antisera are the chemicals produced by the immune system when it tries to fight off an infection. They are highly specific to the particular strain that has infected the body, and sometimes provide cross-protection to other flu strains.  Like the old "gamma globulin" shots for Hepatitis A (now largely replaced by a vaccine), shots of H5N1 antibodies may theoretically help fight off a bird flu infection. 

The National Institutes of Health and St. Jude's Children's Hospital, among others, are interested in this approach and, not long ago, St. Jude's filed patent applications claiming monoclonal antibodies (MABs) against Vietnamese (A/Vietnam/1203/04) and Chinese (A/Hong Kong/213/03) strains (click to download a PDF), not to mention any other MAB that binds to a particular piece of hemagglutinin.

 There's nothing wrong with St. Jude's researching MABs; but there sure as heck is something big wrong with St. Jude's aggressive patenting.  And this is far from their only H5N1 influenza patent application. In other claims, they're in bed with vaccine maker Wyeth.

What is dreadfully wrong is that St. Jude's is a WHO Collaborating Centre that is supposed to be conducting its work in support of the World Health Organization, and not seeking personal and institutional profit through its WHO affiliation.

It's easy to see why some countries are unhappy with St. Jude's. They send virus samples to the WHO GISN for public health purposes and, in return, the WHO lab files proprietary claims and seeks to profit from those materials. 

WHO's leadership knows that St. Jude's is abusing its status as a WHO Collaborating Centre, but so far I'm unaware of even the slightest peep of an objection from Geneva, only excusemaking. As the WHO Secretariat has weakly explained, St. Jude's is an H5N1 "animal disease" Collaborating Centre which, for unknown reasons, makes WHO apparently think that St. Jude's animal ethics are okay.

(They'll be plenty more at this blog about St. Jude's in the coming weeks.)

It's also clear that keeping tabs on just the viruses is not enough. Negotiators in Geneva trying to prevent piracy of WHO materials and to make the virus sharing system more equitable will have to come up with ways to ensure that benefits are shared when it comes to items like MABs.