I remember Scott writing about MIT patenting melatonin some time ago. Was that before the laws changed and now such a patent wouldn’t be given out anymore?
EDIT: Commenters, including a patent lawyer, have filled in the rest of the story. Because melatonin is a natural hormone and not an invention, patents can only cover specific uses of it. The MIT patent covered the proper way to use it for sleep; a broader patent might not have been granted. The patent probably guided supplement companies, but expired about five years ago. It’s now legal to produce melatonin 0.3 mg pills, but people are so used to higher doses that few people do.
So it seems possible that orexin could be patented for use in staying awake (or sleeping), which I had not considered, and which is perhaps what you meant when you wrote this? If so, that would be some helpful nuance to add to your OP as I didn’t know enough about patent law going in to make this distinction, and thought you were talking about patenting orexin the protein, as opposed to the specific use.
I do speak about the patent after the paragraph of using orexin A for narcolpesy 1, so I don’t see that I claimed patenting orexin as such. Besides that use case, registering a patent for using it for depression might be possible as well. Having a new depression meditation that uses a different pathway than the existing ones might plausibly be a drug that produces billions in revenue per year.
This isn’t an orexin-specific decision. Human genes and proteins can’t be patented under EU and US patent law.
I remember Scott writing about MIT patenting melatonin some time ago. Was that before the laws changed and now such a patent wouldn’t be given out anymore?
From Scott’s article:
So it seems possible that orexin could be patented for use in staying awake (or sleeping), which I had not considered, and which is perhaps what you meant when you wrote this? If so, that would be some helpful nuance to add to your OP as I didn’t know enough about patent law going in to make this distinction, and thought you were talking about patenting orexin the protein, as opposed to the specific use.
I do speak about the patent after the paragraph of using orexin A for narcolpesy 1, so I don’t see that I claimed patenting orexin as such. Besides that use case, registering a patent for using it for depression might be possible as well. Having a new depression meditation that uses a different pathway than the existing ones might plausibly be a drug that produces billions in revenue per year.
After reading https://www.reddit.com/r/Peptides/ I do think that there might be a longer post written about the general topic of medical use of peptides.