Examining the role of intellectual property law, policy and management in open innovation models that facilitiate innovation in and access to genomic medicine.

Master of Laws in Medical Law. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg 2017.The traditional closed innovation model is largely supported by a regime where intellectual property rights (IPRs) are used to secure monopolies over inventions, with one justification being that this maximises profits for future innovation. In the pharmaceutical and related healthcare technology industries, such a regime has been criticised as impeding access to healthcare technologies and hampering cumulative innovation. One response to this criticism has been a shift towards a more open innovation model, where more permeable boundaries between organisations facilitates the flow of knowledge for innovation. In such a model, IPRs may be used to facilitate such knowledge flows rather than solely as a means of securing a monopoly, satisfying the interests of private actors to profits, public interest to access advanced technology, and private-public interest to further innovation. In this dissertation, it is explored how IPRs, particularly as patents, may be used to facilitate open collaborative innovation in the genomic medicine field. This relatively nascent field of medicine endeavours to personalise medical decisions based on an individual's genome, but in order to develop the necessary technologies, requires vast amounts of knowledge on the human genome. Many initiatives have adopted intellectual property (IP) policies that facilitate open innovation so as to accelerate knowledge flows and resulting innovation in genomic medicine. Herein, these policies are consolidated to provide a tentative IP policy framework that supports open collaborative innovation in genomic medicine, against which South Africa's Draft IP policy and the IP policy of South Africa's leading research body, the Medical Research Council, is compared. It is found that whilst other countries are directly addressing the issues of patenting in genomic medicine through legislature and case law, South Africa is yet to take comparable actions. This is reflected in its vague patent laws and IP policies regarding IP in genomic medicine. Though there may be common elements that support open innovation between the policies of international initiatives and those of South Africa, the lack of clarity in the South African instruments does not provide a strong foundation for open innovation in genomic medicine. However, as the national IP policy is still in its draft phase, and this policy recognises the value of protecting public health, there may be opportunity to amend provisions to provide the necessary direction towards open innovation in genomic medicine, especially for bodies such as the Medical Research Council

Review on Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an age of disconnection. Tung-Hui Hu (2022). Massachusetts, USA. MIT Press

This review on the book 'Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection' by Tung-Hui Hu explores Hu's conceptualisation of digital lethargy through a spiritual philosophical lens. Hu, who navigates this technological phenomenon of digital lethargy using various forms of performance art, challenges the idea that digital technologies support individuation when users are, in fact, tired of having to individuate. The review examines how Hu offers an alternative route to despair and destruction to those unfairly shouldering the burden of a biased digital age; a route, that perhaps, highlights the power held in the moments of idleness, of timepass, of lethargy, of endurance that exist almost imperceptibly between the forced lively clicks, swipes and movements of the digital world

MicroRNA-146a rs2910164 is associated with severe preeclampsia in Black South African women on HAART

Abstract Background South African (SA) Black women have a high prevalence of preeclampsia and HIV, both conditions associated with increased inflammation. miR-146a is an inflammatory-associated miR and a common single nucleotide polymorphism (rs2910164) has been associated with several disease conditions. To date, this SNP has not been investigated in SA Black women. We therefore aimed to investigate the miR-146a G\u2009>\u2009C SNP in SA Blacks with preeclampsia, and further examine possible association among preeclamptic (PE) women with HIV infection on HAART. Methods This hospital-based, case-control study included 95 normotensive and 98 PE Black SA women (aged 16\u201346 years old). Patients and controls were genotyped by PCR-RFLP. Using a Cytometric Bead Array assay, serum cytokine levels (including Th1- and Th2-related cytokines) were determined in 4 groups of pregnant women, viz: normotensive, HIV infected, PE\u2009+\u2009HIV infected, and PE women. Results There was no significant association between the miR-146a polymorphism and PE susceptibility in our data. However, in the subgroup analyses, the variant genotypes (GC/CC) were significantly associated with lower severe PE risk ( p \u2009=\u20090.0497), more especially in the presence of HIV and HAART ( p \u2009=\u20090.017). In the normotensive group, the variant genotypes were associated with lower IL-2 in both the total normotensive group (269\u2009\ub1\u20091.26 (36) vs 273\u2009\ub1\u20091.31 (23); p \u2009=\u20090.035) and the PE HIV+ sub-group 265\u2009\ub1\u20091.54 (19) vs 271\u2009\ub1\u20091.38 (11); p\u2009= \u20090.008). Conclusions Our study suggests that miR-146a rs2910164 polymorphism might not be associated with PE susceptibility, cytokines or related features. However, the miR-146a GC/CC genotype might reduce susceptibility to severe PE, which might be further influenced by the presence of co-morbid HIV infection among pregnant women on HAART. This variant genotype may also be associated with reduced circulating IL-2 levels and thus reduced pro-inflammatory response in normotensive women, which may be further influenced by the presence of HIV infection and HAART