UN talks aim to turn DNA data into assets

• "It puts a whole lot of sand in the machine," says Pierre du Plessis, a technical adviser to an African group of negotiators.
• "It's in everyone's interest to put in place an agreed system for not unnecessarily restricting access to data."

The dilemma for countries that take a hard line protecting their genetic resources is that they could be cut off from royalties, technology transfers and other potential benefits.

• Opting in to a system would ensure some benefits, but governments still would have to decide whether their interests are protected.

Driving the news: The UN-sponsored talks this week aim to plug a gap in the 2014 Nagoya Protocol, which laid out rules for accessing genetic resources — samples from plants, animals and microbes.

• The pact didn't address genetic sequences uploaded to open databases that can be accessed for commercial purposes.
• "The Nagoya Protocol wasn't future-proofed, and benefit sharing isn't delivering," says Amber Hartman Scholz, who heads the Science Policy and Internationalization department at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ.

Zoom in: Negotiators in Montreal are tasked with drafting a proposal outlining who has to pay for sequencing data, how much they have to pay and for what uses.

• The benefits could come in the form of royalty payments, scientific collaborations or assistance building local scientific infrastructure and capacity.
• A group of African countries has proposed a flat rate of 1% of commercial sales to be put into a fund to support biodiversity conservation, especially by Indigenous people and local communities.
• The value chain doesn't begin "with the use of a sequence, but with the protection of biodiversity and its stewards," the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity and the Indigenous Women's Biodiversity Network said in a statement.

On the other end of that value chain are industries that a UN-commissioned study estimates will generate $1.5 trillion in revenue this year from products derived from genetic data.

• But the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations this week in Montreal said that estimate includes human sequencing data that is outside the purview of the UN umbrella for current negotiations.
• They also expressed concern that the talks won't take into account how pharma already reinvests revenue back into R&D and said the options on the table heading into the week's negotiations appear simple but "would not work in reality."

The big picture: The talks in some ways echo those between AI developers and publishers over the use of internet data and media content to train generative AI models.

• But the stakes are higher, says Glen Gowers, a co-founder of Basecamp Research, a UK-based company that collects genetic samples around the world to create a biodiversity database that its AI models use to design new proteins.
• "You're talking about sovereign biodiversity, physical assets, protectable assets, and then drugs that will be on the market for 20 years saving patients lives."

While global rules are being hashed out, some companies, countries and groups are developing their own systems for sharing benefits from genetic sequences, including data from people.

• Variant Bio, which is developing drugs by looking at populations with rare genetic variants, has a pledge that includes sharing 4% of its revenue.
• Basecamp this week announced a partnership with the government of Cameroon under which the company will train local teams to collect and process flora, fauna and microbe samples for its database while also helping the country build its scientific capacity. Basecamp also pays royalties to countries whose sequence information helps design proteins.
• "We're turning biodiversity into an asset class because we are now showing the world that it is possible if you do it right from the beginning," says Bupe Mwambingu, the company's biodiversity partnership manager.
• Both companies say communities should benefit regardless of whether their genetic data is ultimately commercialized.

"There are ethical ways to do this," says Keolu Fox, a human geneticist and assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego who advised Variant on its benefit-sharing and is a co-founder of the Native BioData Consortium.

• "I think it is going to happen in private industry and in systems that are independent of federal governments with legacies of extraction and exploitation," he says.
• While Indigenous groups may have a seat at the table in negotiations like those in Montreal, Fox says, "we built our own table and our own room."

What to watch: Any agreement drafted this week will be further negotiated and potentially adopted at the UN Biodiversity Convention in Colombia this fall. After that, there would still likely be a long set of decisions and negotiations about how the agreement is implemented in different countries.

• The rules could also inform other efforts that involve genetic resources, including negotiations around the World Health Organization's Pandemic Treaty, in which specimen and sequence sharing was a key sticking point.