THEY may be the future of medicine, but stem cells are simply too controversial to draw money from investors, leaving a gap for non-commercial researchers to step into, a survey of recent patents reveals.
Just three individual governments and academic institutions account for a quarter of the patents held by the world’s top 20 stem cell patent-holders. “The overall distribution looks heavily biased towards governments and academia,” says Gareth Williams, author of the survey by the UK law firm Marks & Clerk, based in Cambridge.
Of the 2000 stem cell patents filed between 2000 and 2005, the University of California and…
