Two non-profit organizations are petitioning the United States Patent Office to rescind a University of Texas patent on a medical research procedure involving beagles.

The American Anti-Vivisection Society, an animal-rights group, and members of PatentWatch Project, a patent watchdog group, submitted a request for re-examination to the patent office last Wednesday. The request is the first step a party can take to challenge a patent.

The patent is for a procedure that suppresses a beagle's immune system to simulate the effects of HIV and cancer treatment, according to the text of the patent. The procedure allows researchers to test antifungal medications on subjects with weakened immune systems.

AAVS and PatentWatch claim researchers at UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center are trying to patent living organisms as if they were inanimate objects, said Crystal Miller-Spiegel, public policy director for the AAVS.

"We don't treat our companion animals like we treat our toasters or computers," said Sue Leary, president of AAVS. "They are not articles of manufacture."

Borje Andersson, a doctor at M.D. Anderson who worked on the patent, said the organizations misunderstand the issue.

"We did not patent the beagle. It is the process, the model, that is of interest," Andersson said.

Andersson said it is the large-animal model that was patented. He contrasted this model with similar experiments that have been conducted on smaller animals like mice.

It is the patent's language that causes controversy, said Peter DiMauro, a spokesman for PatentWatch.

DiMauro said the patent's explicit use of the word 'beagle' is an attempt to monopolize the use of the beagle, a preferred test subject for many researchers.

The two groups also claim the patent is not a new invention. Patent law states that an invention or a process must be nonobvious to a researcher in the related field, meaning it cannot be a process that is common knowledge.

DiMauro said the researchers are merely taking the 50-year-old technique of immunosuppression and applying it to a different subject. The groups cited the European Patent Office's ruling that the large-animal model patent contained no "inventive activity."

Miller-Spiegel said AAVS urges scientists to consider alternatives to animal testing, including in vitro methods.

Andersson said in vitro methods are insufficient.

"There are some things that simply can not be tested in petri dishes," he said.

The FDA requires researchers to test drugs on both large and small animals before clinical tests on humans can begin, Andersson said.

The U.S. patent office will review the groups' claim over the next three months. The office will then issue a statement for interested parties to review before the office makes a final decision.

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