CAMBIA

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

CAMBIA is a not-for-profit plant biotechnology research centre founded in 1992 by Richard Anthony Jefferson and located in Canberra, Australia.

CAMBIA was initially an acronym for the "Center for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture". However, as its work has expanded beyond agriculture to diverse life science applications, the longer name is no longer used. The word cambia in Italian and Spanish means change, which is now the official explanation of the organization for its name.

CAMBIA works on developing mechanisms for plant improvement, and providing that technology using an open-access or open source model.

The key goal of CAMBIA is to promote open-source innovation in the wider arena of biotechnology. They see open-source as an enabler of innovation, and have developed a suite of technologies, patents and licenses that in their view will give innovators greater freedom to develop and market new biotechnologies.

[edit] Disadvantages with current Intellectual Property regimes

In biotechnology, intellectual property issues often arise, with much of the enabling technology covered under complicated patents. It is CAMBIA's opinion that the current regime creates:

a requirement for expensive, high-margin applications that fail to address the nutritional and market needs of impoverished societies

an environment hostile to competition; the high-capital requirements to acquire and negotiate patent rights denies smaller ventures entry into the marketplace, thus concentrating market power into the hands of the wealthiest companies

self-reinforcing barriers to future improvement, as various parties aggressively hoard their IP in fear of losing out, but end up limiting their freedom to innovate, best known as the Tragedy of the anticommons

As a concrete example of IP, the current industry-standard for plant improvement, injecting genes into crops via Agrobacterium tumefaciens, carries with it a thicket of patent rights, held by many parties.

For these reasons CAMBIA develops alternative systems to allow innovators to "work-around, work-above" the current system. These systems include