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Implementing the Nagoya Protocol in microbiology

      Nagoya First Aid kit   Laws and regulations  

 

BCCM helps building Trust between research partners: academic and industrial scientists, users and providers of microbiological raw material for R&I.

 

This section proposes information on how to proceed on the safe side, with a maximum of guarantee concerning the safeguard of your rights and to ensure that you abide by the law when "accessing" and "using" microbiological raw material, without prejudice of your rights, these of your partners and the other stakeholders.

 

Introduction

The mission of culture collections is to provide facilitated access to technically as well as legally fit-for-use microbiological resources. Therefore, since 1997, BCCM has launched and contributed to initiatives that are now referred to as pragmatic solutions to translate the Access and Benefit Sharing principle (1) into practice.

The BCCM consortium has acted proactively to facilitate R&D in microbiology, for academic as well as for industrial purposes, starting with the MOSAICC Code of Conduct, up to the TRUST initiative.

Our goal is to avoid disruption of the delivery of services and microbial material also during the transition period where not all countries parties of the Nagoya Protocol have relevant legislation in place. 
BCCM has anticipated these legal developments and have designed solutions in coordination with the World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC).

 

BCCM policy

Following the MOSAICC recommendations, BCCM collections were ones of the first in Europe to distribute the microbiological material under a standard set of general conditions of distribution so-called MTA, Material Transfer Agreement.

The policy regarding the deposit of strains in one of the BCCM collections, is also framed into a set of general conditions so-called MDA, Material Deposit Agreement.

BCCM teams will guide you into the Procedure of deposit or Order of strains

These contracts and procedures set the BCCM policy of preservation and distribution of strains into words and allows the purchasers of the BCCM material to use it in conformity with the legal requirements, including those of the Nagoya Protocol, the EU Regulation 511/2014 on the Nagoya Protocol, the Implementing act 2015-1866 of EU Regulation 511/2014, the national laws specifically designed to implement the Nagoya Protocol as well as the other laws pertaining to the use, transport, study, handling of microbiological material and related data in a socio-economic responsible and safe way. These are the biosafety and biosecurity regulations and the modalities related to the protection of intellectual property rights such as the Budapest Treaty for patent purposes.

 

Philippe Desmeth
BCCM International Cooperation Manager
Former president of the World Federation for Culture Collections
http://www.wfcc.info

 

(1) The Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization or in short the Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) concept is originally coined in article 15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) which states that a country has the sovereign rights to organise the access to its biological diversity, that it is advised to facilitate such access. In return the country can expect from the users of biological material for R&D purposes a fair and equitable sharing of the benefit arising out of the utilization of this material. The fair and equitable sharing of the benefit is one of the three objectives of the CBD, next to the conservation of biological diversity and the sustainable use of its components.

 

      Nagoya First Aid kit   Laws and regulations