A new partnership announced at the World Economic Forum this week plans to sequence the genome of all biodiversity in the Amazon basin and make sure that benefits from the commercialisation of products derived from this mapping are fairly and equitably shared.

Harris Lewin, professor of evolution and ecology and Robert and Rosabel Osborne Endowed Chair at the University of California, Davis, and Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio, chairman of Space Time Ventures announced a partnership between the Earth Biogenome Project and the Earth Bank of Codes.

The partnership will start with a project in the Amazon basin, which, according to Castilla-Rubio, holds 15 to 25 percent of all land-based biodiversity. The Amazon basin includes Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela.

According to Lewin, only 10 percent of all species inhabiting our planet have been discovered, not counting billions of microbes and organisms, he said. Numerous drugs have been developed from plants, he said. Scientists have some knowledge of the genome of about 15,000 species out of all known species, somewhat around 2 million, he said, and only about 2,500 species had their genomes sequenced to completion.

The Earth Biogenome Project is led by a group of scientists, and proposes to sequence of all life on earth in a 10-year period, Lewin said. That sequencing would maximise returns to society, enable conservation and restoration of the biodiversity, and understanding of ecosystems.

This project requires innovation, he said, such as portable sequencers, autonomous vehicles such as drones to get samples from the field. The whole project could be achieved with a cost of US$4.8 billion, he said, comparing it with the US$3billion it took 27 years ago to sequence the human genome.

The work has begun, he said, citing as an example the Rockefeller University (US) Vertebrate Genomes Project Plan, and adding that many countries and institutions are joining in.

He said participating countries have to know that their biodiversity and the intellectual property derived from it will be protected and that the benefits will be equitably shared. The partnership with the Earth Bank of Codes will do exactly that, he added.

New Bio-Economy in Amazon Basin

Castilla-Rubio presented a video explaining that the Amazonian Kampo frog could be an answer to the issue of antimicrobial resistance. Local people in Peru and Brazil have been using tropical frogs for centuries, it said, and scientists found out that frogs are bio-factories of valuable compounds, which could be a life-saving source of new antibiotics. Some 300 antimicrobial peptides have been identified in tropical frogs, the video explained.

Examples such as the frog can be the source of a large scale new bio-economy, much larger than the current economy in the Amazon basin “that relies on the exploitation of natural resources,” he said. The current economy in the region is worth US$250 billion a year, he said, “the economy that we are talking about will unlock trillions of US dollars.”

“The bio-economy that we are calling for actually changes the game,” he said, adding that three challenges are in the way of this bio-economy. The first one is the Amazon is under severe threat, such as drought and floods.

Complexity of Benefit-Sharing, Rampant Biopiracy

The second one is the complexity of the equitable sharing of benefits between the commercial users of these assets, and the originators of the assets, and in particular the indigenous communities which have known about these assets for centuries. Today, he said, very little of the financial benefits associated with these assets have been shared with the originators, either with biodiverse countries or the custodians.

Even in the context where over 100 nations have signed the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization, it is very complex to unlock benefits and share them fairly and equitably, according to Castilla-Rubio.

The complexity comes in part from “pervasive biopiracy, of the intended and unintended type,” he said, and all biodiverse countries around the world are facing this issue, particularly in the developing world, he added.

When we speak about traditional knowledge, he said, it is mostly about a public good, a social good, transmitted from generations to generations. “In our world,” he said, “any valuable knowledge is privatised in the form of patents to incentivise the innovators.” “We must reconcile the two worlds to unlock this challenge,” he said.

The third challenge is the complexity to regulate because biology is increasingly digital and engineered, he said. Some discoveries could stem from six different species from five different continents, he explained, raising the question of how can monetary attribution be done, and the subsequent benefit sharing, he asked.

These issues led to the creation of the Amazon Bank of Codes, which is a “global public good,” a digital platform that has two key objectives, he said. The first is making the current and future value of biological assets visible and accessible, and the second is ensuring that the fair and equitable of benefits is embedded in the design.

The IP assets of innovators will be registered on a blockchain, and there will be a codification of rights and obligations, so that if those assets are used commercially a mechanism will be ready to share the benefits fairly and equitably with the countries of origin and the custodians of nature, he said. Innovators will also have access to a “Wikipedia of life.”

Following the first project of the Amazon Bank of Codes, it will be expanded to an Earth Bank of Codes, he said.