Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[ZincFinger]

Zinc fingers and the piggyBac transposons are the only currently practical means of making genetic modifications to silkworms for the production of spider silks, so exclusive rights to their application to silkworms for that purpose constitutes real IP protection. KBLB does not need nor want to own more of the rights to the piggyBac and zinc fingers (i.e.: for other uses) because it does not need them and would have to pay for them.

There are other methods of genetic modification (GM) but they are totally unusable for the purpose of modifying silkworms to produced spider silk. The reason is that they are far more random in their insertions than the piggyBac transposon (which is itself random but far less so) and especially zinc fingers which are completely exact.)

It requires the insertion of many genes to get silkworms to make spider silk (that's why it took KBLB so long to do what it did with the piggyBac transposon. Even then the piggyBac just couldn't do the job because the silkworm silk protein genes needed to be removed (their continued presence was why the Gen1 worms had worm silk protein mixed in with the spider silk protein) Each gene has to be placed in a suitable location (the location determines what tissue it's expressed in and under what circumstances it is expressed).

Other methods of GM are so random that the overwhelming majority of insertions won't work because random placement puts them where they are not expressed at all, or in the wrong tissue, or under the wrong circumstances or kill the organism by being inserted into a gene and disabling that gene. It's very hard to get them to work on installing just one GM. If they have to do a whole set of them they become completely impractical.

So exclusive rights to the use of zinc fingers and the piggyBac for that purpose constitutes real and effective protection of KBLB's technology.

In addition KBLB holds exclusive rights to over 200 spider genes, all related to silk production. That is a second very strong protection to KBLB's technology. Where would anyone get the genes for spider silk production if not from a spider?