Prof Aisling McMahon was recently invited to speak at two international conferences at the University of Technology, Sydney. On 7th March 2025, Prof McMahon spoke at the ‘New Frontiers in Intellectual Property’ conference organised by Dr Genevieve Wilkinson at the University of Technology Sydney. This conference hosted a series of panels featuring eminent international and Australian intellectual property law experts identifying diverse domestic and global frontiers for IP. Panels considered a range of topics including, new frontiers in trademarks; IP, health and a healthy environment; collective rights and digital landscapes. Prof McMahon spoke on the panel on ‘IP, Health and a healthy environment’ alongside: Prof Jane Nielsen (University of Tasmania), Dr Omowamiwa Kolawole (University of Toronto), Dr Genevieve Wilkinson (University of Technology, Sydney) and Dr Elena Izyumenko (University of Amsterdam). This panel was chaired by Professor Dianne Nicol (University of Tasmina). As part of this panel, Prof McMahon discussed her ERC funded PatentsInHumans project and considered how patent rights over various emerging technologies – and how such patents are used – can have significant implications for how we treat, use and modify the human body with knock-on impacts for a range of bioethical interests. Thus, she made the case that patents over such technologies are posing new frontiers for patent law and bioethics.
On 8th March 2025, Prof McMahon spoke at the “Future of Intellectual Property and Human Rights” conference. This conference was organised by Dr Geneive Wilkinson (University of Technology Sydney) and Prof Peter Yu (Texas A&M University, School of Law) and featured leading international intellectual property scholars who considered the role, challenges and scope for human rights analysis within intellectual property systems. Prof McMahon spoke about the role and challenges for human rights in the context of patents over technologies related to the human body. She reflected on the role of human rights at patent grant stage in Europe under the morality/ordre public exclusion to patentability. She also considered the potential for human rights challenges to be used to ameliorate certain impacts of patents on equitable access to emerging health-technologies, and potential barriers to such challenges.
Professor Aisling McMahon is a Professor of Law at the School of Law & Criminology, Maynooth University and is the Principal Investigator on the European Research Council funded PatentsInHumans project.
You can find out more about the PatentsInHumans project by visiting the project website: www.patentsinhumans.eu or by watching this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFVRHpzzuQM
