By Kim Coghill

Washington Editor

WASHINGTON ¿ The House passed legislation this week authorizing the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to retain all user fees it collects next year instead of having to share it with other government offices.

The PTO does not receive taxpayer money, rather it is fully funded by user fees, which are expected to generate upwards of $1 billion in fiscal year 2002.

According to Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), who spoke on the House floor Tuesday in favor of the legislation, ¿the appropriators and the administration treat PTO like a savings and loan, and divert its money every year for other government programs. To date, more than $600 million in fees has been diverted since 1992, and this year alone the appropriators are taking $200 million.¿

If the House has its way, that will change ¿ at least in the upcoming fiscal year.

Introduced by Reps. Howard Coble (R-N.C.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the Patent and Trademark Office Authorization Act of 2002 (HR2047) gives the PTO the authority to keep its money, but also requires that the agency develop both a strategic plan for the next five years and an electronic system for filing and processing patent and trademark applications.

Todd Dickinson, a patent attorney in Washington and a former undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property and director of the United States Patent Office, told BioWorld Today that the PTO certainly would favor retaining all fees that are paid for patents.

¿What will happen over time, if funds continue to be diverted, the time it takes to get the patent application through the process and out as a patent itself will continue to grow,¿ Dickinson said. Under current operations, Dickinson said on average, across all technologies, it takes about two years.

¿But if the diversion continues, the time will grow and within five years it will be up to a three-year process, from start to finish,¿ Dickinson said. ¿A year on a biotech patent is substantial.¿

In fiscal year 2002, the PTO projects a 12 percent increase in patent filings and an 84 percent increase in fiscal year 2006, Lila Feisee, director of intellectual property for Washington-based Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) said in a prepared statement.

The PTO also has reported a projected 400 percent increase in patent applications waiting for action by 2006 (from 256,520 in fiscal 2002 to 1.29 million in 2006).

BIO supports the extra PTO funding, Feisee told BioWorld Today, adding that money will help move the backlog of applications.

¿They need to streamline a lot of their processes because many of our applications are extremely complicated in nature and a lot of them have sequences that are difficult to deal with,¿ she said. ¿Additional funding would allow them to implement automation.¿

The House approved the bill in a ¿voice¿ vote and Feisee said BIO expects similar legislation to be offered fairly soon in the Senate. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) said the bill makes the PTO a more responsive and efficient agency that will better serve the needs of inventors and trademark fliers.

Others, like Barney Frank (D-Mass.), agreed, saying the government should maximize its ability to service the innovators in the economy.

¿The answer is not to divert revenues from the PTO to pay for other programs, but to stop this practice of reducing the government¿s revenues by tax cuts that leave us unable to afford programs for which there is great demand and great need,¿ he said. ¿In other words, this practice of raiding the patent fees to fund other programs is one of the negative consequences of reducing government revenues through irresponsible tax cuts below the level necessary to sustain important government activity.¿

Stem Cell Lines Posted

The National Institutes of Health Wednesday posted its Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry at www.nih.gov, listing 72, not 64, stem cell lines that are available for study with federal dollars. The lines are at various stages of development and, according to reports, the additional eight were grown at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation in Madison, Wis., from lines that already had been approved.

In a hearing on Capitol Hill last week, Wendy Baldwin, deputy director of extramural research at the NIH, said she expects the government to begin awarding funds for research next year. The application deadline is November 27.

On August 9, President George Bush said the government would fund research on 64 existing stem cell lines considered viable by the administration. Bush¿s policy changed the rule approved a year before by former President Bill Clinton, who said the government would pay for the research as long as a private company collected the cells.