Cancer tests will continue despite patent wrangle

The Australian hospital laboratory used to test New Zealand women for genetic susceptibility to an aggressive form of breast and ovarian cancer will continue the tests despite a patent row, the Auckland District Health Board says. The tests, which detect mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, are performed at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne. But the clinic and seven other Australian laboratories nationwide have been told by Melbourne company Genetic Technologies (GTG) that it will use patent rights it owns on the tests to conduct all future BRCA testing itself, stopping other labs from competing. A spokeswoman for the Auckland DHB said the Australian Government had told the MacCallum clinic to continue testing and had promised it would be indemnified for any dispute over the intellectual property rights. "It's business as usual." The tests, which are paid for by the DHB, cost up to A$2500 ($3205) each and are usually done on relatives of women with certain types of breast cancer: a woman with a particular BRCA mutation faces an up to 85 per cent chance of breast cancer by age 70, compared with a 9 per cent risk for other women. Genetic Technologies said five years ago - when it obtained the patent rights from Myriad, the US inventor of the tests - that it would not attempt to restrict other local health service providers already conducting such testing from carrying on. It was its "gift to the people of Australia and New Zealand", it said in a statement to the Australian stock exchange in May 2003, the Australian newspaper reported yesterday. But this month it told those laboratories in Australia offering the tests to stop within seven days. Australia's Department of Health and Ageing obtained an extension of the seven-day deadline until after August 6. The company previously attracted criticism in New Zealand when it sought to enforce controversial patents covering non-coding DNA used in diagnostic analysis and genomic mapping. In that case the Auckland DHB - acting on behalf of the country's 21 DHBs and the New Zealand Blood Service - decided to take GTG to the High Court. GTG initially demanded a one-off $10 million payment to use its DNA patents, as well as an annual licence fee of $2 million, but that was later reduced to an A$250,000 ($320,500) fee and an annuity of A$50,000, ($64,000) before the claim was withdrawn. As part of the settlement with the DHB, GTG also granted royalty-free commercial licences tostate science companies AgResearch, HortResearch and Forest Research, along with the Livestock Improvement Corporation. By Ms.Bobby Aanand, Metropolitan Jury.

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