Peanut Butter and Patents

Finally caught up to Anderson Cooper’s report about Plumpy’nut, which aired on Sixty Minutes a little over a week ago. Besides intimating that Doctors Without Borders had invented Plumpy’nut (which it didn’t), the 11-minute CBS report completely neglected to mention that Plumpy’nut is patented. (Thanks to Josh for sending me the link.)

Okay, you say, CBS has produced a feel-good story that doesn’t have to be encyclopedic. But given the fact that Cooper says that there’s not enough Plumpy’nut to go around and ties the shortage to a lack of vision from food aid donors, you would think he might have at least mentioned other challenges, like negotiations over licensing and franchising rights stemming from the patent(s).

A nutrition researcher I haven’t seen for over a year tells me about research on peanut-based nutritional supplements in the late 1970s and early 1980s that may (or may not) constitute prior art. While attending my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary in Dallas last weekend, I learn that one of my cousins in France used to work for Nutriset for a year.

The research paper is “Dietary Supplementation of Gambian Nursing Mothers and Lactational Performance” and was published in the Lancet, Oct. 25, 1980, vol. 2, pages 886 to 888. (Will post link to an abtract in Medline soon. Here’s the abstract with a brief description of the peanuts-and-dried-milk-based supplement from Medline.)

The Lancet paper contains a reference to a “supplement that consists of locally prepared groundnut-based biscuits also containing wheat-soy flour, dried skimmed milk, groundnut oil, and sugar, together with a tea drink fortified with 0.6 ml ‘Abidec’ multi-vitamin supplement (Parke-Davis Co. Ltd) per daily portion.”

There are a number of similarities here with Plumpy’nut and some important differences. Similarities include: use of groundnuts (presumably peanuts), dried milk, oil, multi-vitamins. Differences include: use of tea (requiring clean water). Questions to investigate: Is the 1980 Lancet work prior art? Is it significant?

As for my cousin having once worked for Nutriset (my Mom’s family is from Normandy, near where Nutriset is located), that’s quite a coincidence but it doesn’t seem like a conflict to me. In any event, I’m publishing it so that you can reach your own conclusions.

Dr. Richard Cash, who helped to develop oral rehydration therapy (ORT) for the treatment of severe diarrhea, never even thought about taking a patent out on his product. His experience illuminates the road not travelled for Plumpy’nut, the patented “miracle food” for malnourished children.

I asked Cash after class at Harvard’s School of Public Health earlier this week whether he had ever sought a patent for ORT. He said that as a member of the US Public Health Service (with the NIH) in 1968, he doesn’t think patenting was an option for him or his colleagues. Also, he admitted, it never really crossed his mind. Perhaps if it had, he said with a twinkle in his eye, he might not still be teaching at the School of Public Health.

Did the lack of a patent make it more difficult to get businesses to consider manufacturing and marketing ORT? Yes, at first, he said. Business people he talked to didn’t believe that they could make money through branding the product rather than on the basis of an exclusive monopoly. And yet, “look at aspirin,” Cash pointed out. “There hasn’t been a patent on aspirin for years and yet people still make money selling it.”

ORT, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is a very basic combination of a pinch of salt, a handful of sugar and 500 ml of clean water, that replaces the electrolytes lost during a bout of severe diarrhea. It doesn’t cure diarrhea but it prevents deaths from severe diarrhea, particularly in situations where access to medical care is severely limited. ORT has saved literally millions of lives over the past 40 years.

Cash and others worked with BRAC, the giant non-governmental organization in Bangladesh, to teach women how to stir up their own ORT solutions and treat their children on their own in the 1970s. (Hence the basic recipe of a pinch of salt, a handful of sugar and 500 ml of clean water. How do you get poor women to approximate 500 ml of water when they don’t have measuring cups of their own? You take one measuring cup and fill up each woman’s own pot with 500 ml of water. She then puts a mark on her own cooking pot or pan showing where the fill line is for 500 ml.)

A number of businesses also now sell packets of ORT to NGOs, governments, international travellers and the like. If you’ve ever given Pedialyte (made by Abbott Labs) to treat one of your kids who has been sick all night vomiting or with diarrhea, you can thank Richard Cash and his public health colleagues for figuring out, testing and validating the original formula.

A blogger from New Zealand has successfully petitioned the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to reject several patents protecting “one-click shopping” on Amazon.com. Peter Calveley found enough “prior art” that the USPTO rejected all but five of Amazon’s 26 patents. A sign of things to come?

Read more in Peter Calveley’s own words.

Discover your inner Sherlock Holmes and conduct a search, talk to an expert you just met, visit with a librarian, etc. Spend as little as ten minutes or all day, if you want, following your clue.

If you learn something interesting that relates to Nutriset, Plumpy’nut, humanitarian feeding programs or patents, summarize what you have found in a comment to this post.

Other readers are then free to comment on the quality of your information, follow up your clue or add clues of their own. Authors of the best comments will want to become writers in their own right, adding posts of their own.

(For now, the process of becoming a writer–as opposed to a commenter–is pretty informal: just e-mail Christine at cgormanhealth[AT]gmail[DOT]com. Be sure to use your real name, give real contact information and say why you want to publish your own posts on the blog and what you think you can contribute. As the community grows, the process will undoubtedly evolve.)

All posts that suggest new resources or avenues of inquiry should be tagged with the “suggested leads” category.

As noted above, the best part of collaborative reporting–you put as much or as little effort into the project as you want. The experiment is to see if the sum of all these individual intellectual efforts will amount to something valuable–something that will help more malnourished kids get fed or that provides greater insight into the way the humanitarian business gets done.

Harvard professor Michael Sandel wonders if the neem story might have some bearing on patenting peanut-based foods for malnourished children. I asked Sandel about Nutriset after a talk he gave this evening at the Nieman Foundation.

At the turn of the 21st century, the European patent office revoked a patent it had granted on a fungicide derived from the neem tree, the source of many traditional agricultural products in India. In essence, the European patent office recognized that farmers had been using the seeds, oils and other parts of the neem tree for years to fight pests, blight and other agricultural problems. So the patent holders–in this case the US Department of Agriculture and W.R. Grace–were not entitled to the patent because they had not in fact created something novel.

Which brings up a few questions: Is there any previous history of using peanut butter mixes to fight starvation or treat malnourishment? If so, would that constitute what patent lawyers call “prior art”? And how many children would die of malnourishment before the challenge could finally be adjudicated? Related to that, how much money would have to be spent on the challenge and wouldn’t that money just be better spent buying the (patented) stuff and giving it to the kids?

Here is a 2002 U.S. patent for Nutriset’s Plumpy’nut from the ever-helpful database of the U.S. Patent and Trademark office. Still looking for patent applications in other countries.

Pretty much says it all. How many patents cover Plumpy’nut? Where and when were they issued? What do they say?

This blog is an experiment in collaborative reporting. The objective is to learn as much as possible about patents, Plumpy’nut and the needs of millions of malnourished children around the world.

Some background: Plumpy’nut is a combination of peanut butter and powdered milk with a few vitamins and minerals thrown in for good measure. Ever since the mixture was introduced to humanitarian organizations a few years ago, it has saved the lives of many malnourished children around the world and garnered Nutriset, the company that makes it, a great deal of positive press. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that Nutriset has patented Plumpy’nut.

The questions we’re trying to explore: What effect–for good or for ill or somewhere in between–has the patent(s) on Plumpy’nut had on meeting the needs of malnourished children? Has patenting Plumpy’nut attracted greater investment in an otherwise overlooked field? Has it hindered the ability of humanitarian groups to make their own peanut-packed mixes? We invite you to help explore these and other questions.