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For more than a decade,
CAMBIA has been creating new
tools and technologies to foster innovation and a spirit of
collaboration in the biological sciences. Our institutional
ethos is built around an awareness of the need and opportunity
for local commitment to achieving lasting solutions to food
security, agricultural and environmental problems.
CAMBIA, in Spanish and Italian,
means 'change'. This meaning is at the very heart of CAMBIA's
mission. CAMBIA founded the BIOS Initiative, Biological
Innovation for an Open Society.
The BIOS Initiative website provides a template license for
a new mode of licensing technology that encourages improvements,
modeled after the open source licensing concept in software but
adapted for biological innovations including patented
technologies.
CAMBIA was initially an acronym
for the "Center for the Application of Molecular Biology to
International Agriculture". However, CAMBIA's public good
mandate has become broader, to encompass methods for all kinds
of biological innovation. CAMBIA, a not-for-profit organization
situated in Canberra, Australia, was founded over ten years ago
by Richard Jefferson. While a PhD student at Colorado, Richard
developed a technique that monitors the activity of transgenes
by tagging them with the bacterial enzyme GUS. Richard provided
this technology to many researchers and companies. Utilization
of GUS, the world’s most widely licensed technology in
agricultural biotechnology, is now ubiquitous in the world of
plant genetics and Richard’s PhD thesis is the most widely-cited
piece of literature in the discipline.
CAMBIA has three main areas of
expertise:
Life Sciences
CAMBIA has
developed enabling technologies for plant transformation, plant gene
activity manipulation, monitoring and selection, and plant genotype
comparisons, fingerprinting and indexing. All these technologies are
being made broadly available under BIOS licensing.
Intellectual Property
CAMBIA has
developed one of the world's largest and most comprehensive
full-text searchable patent databases, including full text of all
PCT, European and US patents relevant to the life sciences. CAMBIA’s
IT professionals have also developed a clean user interface with
INPADOC, which will be accessible to all. This will used by the
World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), among others, to
assist in patent searching.
Informatics (IT)
CAMBIA’s skilled
IT team has developed many innovations while working on websites for
the technologies mentioned above, including the DEKKO search engine
and user-annotatable licenses and technology landscape white papers.
For more information,
please visit www.cambia.org or
www.bios.net |
