Report of the Committee on Biotechnological Inventions


A. De Clercq (BE), ChairA. De Clercq (BE), Chair


  1. At the inaugural meeting on 7 December 2020 of the newly composed committee election of officers was completed: Chair: Ann De Clercq, Secretary: Simon Wright, liaison persons: for EPPC: Chris Mercer; for Presidium: Heike Vogelsang-Wenke
  2. Election/admission of previous and new associate members: New candidate associate members admitted: Marcus Wolfram, Alessandro Berti, Denise Nestle-Nguyen, Chris Mercer, Anette Hegner
  3. Re-election of previous associate members: Hans-Rainer Jaenichen, Heiko Sendrowski, Jan Desomer, Gautier Obrecht, Willemijn Maria Gommans, Thea van der Wijk, Philip Weinzinger, Adrian Tombling, Elisa Turri, Markus Grammel, Rafal Witek, Lynne Kamibayashi, Heike Vogelsang-Wenke, Andreas Oser,
  4. Meeting with DG1 on 12 February 2021. Discussions about the biotech changes in the GLs for examination for large part.
  5. Plants: the feedback from the CPL52 meeting and opinion, Biotech Committee on disclaimers, propagation material, random mutagenesis, any other ongoing national or court debates were briefly discussed. We will keep on following up the situation and will comment on request in the future.
  6. We took note of a point from BIA (Simon Wright explained) relating to a concern that transgenic animal industry could be adversely affected by G3/19.
  7. WIPO Standard 26 for sequence listings was discussed and a new ad-hoc working group to share available documents was set up. We will share documents in a separate thread on the epi website Biotech Committee forum. There is a concern that we will have to use BISSAP in the future.
  8. epi Biotech members or externals may lecture on biotech in webinars of epi (on request from Paolo Rambelli PEC to all Committee Chairs).
  9. Next meeting date: a further committee meeting can be held digitally as soon as new discussion topics arise.

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