The use of biotechnology in soybean seeds already occupies 30.6 million hectares, more than 80% of the Brazilian planted area, and represents 87% of the market value. Even so, the cost of developing new molecules has doubled in 20 years with the demands of the controlling bodies, informed André Dias, managing partner of Spark – Strategic Intelligence. He participated in the debate “IP in Agribusiness: from genetic technology to automation”, alongside Mariana Caetano, from KPTL, lawyer Philippe Bhering and Priscila Mayumi Kashiwabara, from ABPI’s Plant Varieties Study Committee.
As Dias showed, the submission of new technology products to regulatory bodies has been dramatically reduced due to the delay in analysis. Biological products, on the other hand, had an exponential increase in applications and an “adequate” average release time. According to him, the cost of assessments and the complexity of new regulatory requirements also inhibit product development for crops with lower market value.
Mariana, the head of Agro at KPTL, spoke about the importance of startups protecting their software and hardware. “Market entry is protection. Today, those who get in protected have a significant benefit”, she said. Specializing in venture capital, KPTL has a fund of R$250 million exclusively dedicated to agribusiness.
In his presentation, Souza, Senior Legal Manager for Intellectual Property at Bayer Brasil, argued that mastering innovative technology is not a privilege of private companies. And he cited as an example that the largest number of patents for the CRISPR-Cas9 technology (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats and CRISPR-associated protein 9) belongs to universities and research institutes.
