中国生物工程杂志

As the key achievement of transgenic breeding R&D, transgenic event and its intellectual property (IP) protection lay solid foundation for the commercialization of transgenic crops. It is found that currently majority of the transgenic events of major crops are held by foreign agro-biological companies, such as Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer. About 40 percent of the events are filed for patent protection, 22 applications are also claimed in China with 6 applications already granted. The number of claims is around 20 per patent on the average, which emphatically cover the key technical features like flanking sequence and insertion sequence. The boundaries almost prevent any unauthorized commercial use. In contrast, China has not filed any actual patents on events, although the patent of "Huahui No.1" looks very similar, the scope of protection is rather limited. Thus, in order to dominate the industrialization of biotechnology crops in China, Self-owned IP on events should be fostered, the dynamic trends of targeted foreign patents should be analyzed, and higher degree of patent protection on events must be achieved. Eventually, it is needed to set up a fully- integrated IP protection system for the agro-biotechnology industry.