Heidi Williamss dad helped with her high school science-fair projects by driving her two hours from their North Dakota town to get books on World War II German cryptography. After studying up, she would present new ways to crack the cipher.

These days, Williams is trying to help scientists as they unlock the secrets of a different code: the human genome. The 32-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist is examining health-care innovation with a $430,000 National Science Foundation CAREER grant, an award given to exceptionally promising junior faculty who excel as educators and researchers.

Williams 2010 Ph.D. dissertation was the first empirical study to show that one companys rights to gene data had hindered scientific development, said Harvard University economist Lawrence Katz. It was cited in multiple briefs during a Supreme Court case that ended in June, when justices ruled to restrict companies ability to patent human gene sequences.

No one directly knew these things, said Katz, who advised Williams on the research while she was getting her doctorate in economics at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is affecting how people think about intellectual property. It fed into a rapidly changing area of policy.

Williams is driven by a desire to seek out and try to discover solutions to barriers stalling health-care breakthroughs, she said in an interview from Stanford University in California, where she is on academic leave for a year to research and network with scholars. A working paper she and colleagues circulated in August found that 20-year patent terms encouraged companies to focus on advanced-stage cancers, because clinical trials are shorter and drugs can be brought to market more quickly. Preventative or early-stage treatments require longer clinical trials, leaving less time for exclusive production.

Now, her focus is on determining how patent rules alter gene-related innovation.

Ever since the sequencing of the human genome, there has been a sense that the science hasnt panned out quite as quickly as people had hoped, Williams said. How economics drives innovation has long interested her, she said, and the lack of empirical data on gene-related development made the topic a natural fit.

It could be that the economic incentives havent been aligned appropriately, and thats been holding back the science, she said.

As of 2009, portions of the human genome sequenced by closely held Celera Corp. had produced 20 percent to 30 percent fewer research papers and medical discoveries than genes first mapped by the Human Genome Project, Williams showed in her Ph.D. project. Celeras genes were covered by short-term intellectual-property protections lasting as long as two years, while the projects were open-access.

Groups, including scholars with the Information Society Project atYale Law School, cited the study as the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether human genes can be patented. The case challenged seven patents owned by or licensed to Salt Lake City, Utah-based biotechnology company Myriad Genetics Inc. (MYGN) on genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer. It ended in a ruling that human genes cant be patented, though synthetically produced genetic material can have legal protections.

Excerpt from:
MIT’s Williams Decodes Economics of Gene Sequencing

Comments are closed.