Strange Bedfellows: Native American Tribes, Big Pharma, and the Legitimacy of Their Alliance

Lost in the cacophony surrounding the debate about high drug prices is the fundamental principle that pharmaceutical innovation will not occur without the prospect of outsized returns enabled through market exclusivity. Biopharmaceutical patents are currently under siege, subject to challenge both in inter partes review (“IPR”) proceedings and in Hatch-Waxman actions. These twin assaults threaten to eliminate the incentives necessary for biotechnological innovation—particularly for discoveries made upstream in the innovation pipeline—thus imperiling the development of new drug therapies. But a fascinating solution has emerged: invoking tribal immunity to shield pharmaceutical patents from IPR before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”). This serves two critically important objectives: promoting tribal self-sufficiency, and encouraging investment in life-saving and life-improving new drugs. Contractual partnerships between Native American tribes and pharmaceutical companies not only provide the tribes with a steady stream of royalty revenue, but also insulate biopharmaceutical patents from challenge in IPR proceedings through the invocation of long-established principles of tribal sovereign immunity. This Note is the first piece of scholarship to comprehensively analyze, and advocate for, the right to invoke tribal sovereign immunity in IPR proceedings

A Pattern for Designing Distributed Heterogeneous Ontologies for Facilitating Application Interoperability

The role of ontologies in knowledge base systems is gradually increasing. Along with the growth of Internet based applications and e- commerce, the need for easy interoperability between ontologies is paramount. Today methodologies and design guidelines for building and developing ontologies from scratch exist, and others have focused on evolving step-by-step growth of ontologies as shall be discussed in this paper. However, we find inadequate aid in the design of distributed, heterogeneous and multi-functioned, application ontology, primarily aimed to be the central hub for interoperability between a number of other applications which may or may not be ontology based. In this paper, we present a logical context based ontology design architecture in the form of Principle-Subject-Support(PSS) pattern. The PSS pattern has been used as a guide to analyze and model   several perspectives involved in a practical case study carried out in a military network simulation project to build a distributed repository ontology (DRONT) for interoperability.QC 20120202</p

A Pattern for Designing Distributed Heterogeneous Ontologies for Facilitating Application Interoperability

Abstract. The role of ontologies in knowledge base systems is gradually increasing. Along with the growth of Internet based applications and ecommerce, the need for easy interoperability between ontologies is paramount. Today methodologies and design guidelines for building and developing ontologies from scratch exist, and others have focused on evolving step-by-step growth of ontologies as shall be discussed in this paper. However, we find inadequate aid in the design of distributed, heterogeneous and multi-functioned, application ontology, primarily aimed to be the central hub for interoperability between a number of other applications which may or may not be ontology based. In this paper, we present a logical context based ontology design architecture in the form of Principle-Subject-Support(PSS) pattern. The PSS pattern has been used as a guide to analyze and model several perspectives involved in a practical case study carried out in a military network simulation project to build a distributed repository ontology (DRONT) for interoperability