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Cambia is an independent non-profit institute creating new technologies, tools and paradigms to promote change and enable innovation.

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Molecular Technologies Team
Osmat Azzam Jefferson PhD MIntLaw
Principal Scientist (2005 – 2009), Project Director (2010-2015), Director of Lens Product (2016-2021)
Email: osmat@cambia.org

Osmat joined Cambia in 2005 as a principal scientist to develop open source molecular genetic technologies and provide guidance on the innovation trajectories of meristem- or seed-based transformation processes that will contribute to the capability of the Australian Horticulture industries to offer unencumbered opportunities to tackle commercialisation challenges. Moreover, Osmat led a bio-Sentinels project aimed at engineering plants as living instruments to track and monitor natural resources. During her initial 4-year tenure at Cambia, Osmat contributed open source gene transfer toolkits with improved transformation efficiency in tobacco and rice, coordinated their public distribution under the biological open source (BiOS) licensing paradigm along with the other organisation’s materials, and gained extensive training and experience in patent data analysis along with a master’s degree in International Law from the Australian National University.

Her scientific background includes a Ph.D. from Cornell University in plant sciences focusing on molecular diagnostic tools for plant viruses with minors in biochemistry, ecology, and international agriculture, and a master’s degree in science from the American University of Beirut with a research posting at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Aleppo, Syria.  Following her graduate studies, Osmat participated in a 4-year USAID international development project (bean/cowpea CRSP) in Latin America wherein she helped in capacity building projects and trained students in plant virus research and spent 5 years as a senior scientist at IRRI, an international organisation in the Philippines, training students and researchers in South and Southeast Asia, and building public capabilities across national lab facilities while establishing and managing her own research lab. 

With Cambia’s relocation to Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in 2009, Osmat directed the transitioning of the Cambia Lab facility from Canberra headquarters to QUT Campus while joining both QUT faculties of Science & Technology and Law as a research professor.

There, Osmat research interests expanded to biological innovation systems and moved to designing and developing with the Lens team the Patent Sequence (PatSeq) facility.  The new toolkit offers various applications and links diverse patent-derived attributes with genetic sequences and their scientific information. Moreover, the facility provides navigation capabilities at various levels to collect signals on what is subject for patenting and what is not, explore patenting patterns across genomes, and an ability to zoom in and compare patent claims (see our article in Nature Biotech. In May 2014, a summary of this work was also featured by WIPO magazine.)

Building on that experience, Osmat led the Lens team to expand the Lens patent citations project.  She guided the design and development of the patent citations facility (PatCite) that enables researchers, patent professionals, and policy makers to map who is citing who in the academic and patenting worlds, and coordinated an international research collaboration to develop the influence metric facility, In4M, that measures scholarship influence on industry (https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4049), rank global research institutions, or used as a partnering tool.

From 2016 to 2021, Osmat oversaw the scaling of the Lens architecture, the implementation of the metaRecord, the development of patent API and the licensing of the PatSeq bulk data. She also wrote and managed various grant proposals with national and international Lens partners and established the Lenslabs facility, a community hub to share open data and methodologies.

Publications

Jefferson, OA, Koellhofer, D., Warren, B., Ehrich, T., Lang, S., Williams, K., Ballagh, A., Schellberg, B., Sharma, R., and Jefferson, R. (2021).   Mapping innovation trajectories on SARS-CoV-2 and its variants. Nature Biotechnology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-021-00849-z

Jefferson, OA, Lang, Simon, Williams, Kenny, Koellhofer, Deniz, Ballagh, Aaron, Warren, Ben, Schellberg, B., Sharma, R., and Jefferson, Richard. (2021).  Mapping CRISPR-Cas9 public and commercial innovation using The Lens institutional toolkit. Transgenic Research https://doi.org/10.1007/s11248-021-00237-y

Jefferson, OA, Richard Jefferson, and Aaron Ballagh (2021).  Regenerative Agriculture: Open evidence for its role in solving climate change.  https://www.lens.org/lens/report/view/Regenerative-Agriculture/1098/page/1111

Jefferson, OA, Deniz Koellhofer, Ben Warren, and Richard Jefferson (2019). The Lens MetaRecord and LensID: An open identifier system for aggregated metadata and versioning of knowledge artefacts. LIS Scholarship Archive. November 25. https://doi.org/10.31229/osf.io/t56yh 

Jefferson, OA, Adam Jaffe, Doug Ashton, Ben Warren, Deniz Koellhofer, Uwe Dulleck, Aaron Ballagh, John Moe, Michael DiCuccio, Karl Ward, Geoff Bilder, Kevin Dolby, and Richard Jefferson (2018).  Mapping the global influence of published research on industry and innovation.  Nature Biotechnology 36, 31-39. Available at https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4049

Jefferson, OA, Deniz Köllhofer, Prabha Ajjikuttira & Richard A Jefferson 2015. Public disclosure of biological sequences in global patent practice.  World Patent Information 43 (2015) 12-24.  Available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0172219015000848

Jefferson, OA, Deniz Köllhofer, Thomas H Ehrich & Richard A Jefferson 2015. The ownership question of plant gene and genome intellectual properties. Nature Biotechnology, volume 33, November issue, 1138-1143. Available at http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v33/n11/pdf/nbt.3393.pdf

 Jefferson, OA, Deniz Köllhofer, Thomas H Ehrich & Richard A Jefferson 2013. Transparency tools in gene patenting for informing policy and practice. Nature Biotechnology, volume 31, No. 12, p 1086 – 1093 available at http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n12/full/nbt.2755.html

 Jefferson, OA (2010) Agrobacterium patent literature mined and novel seed-based and meristem based methods identified.  Internal report to Horticulture Australia Ltd.

 Jefferson, OA, Bekir Ulker, Steven V Raines, Brett Baillie, Leon Smith, Wim Broothaerts, Albert Joubert, and Richard A. Jefferson (2009) Improved TransBacter: an Open-Source Gene Transfer Technology. Presented at the International Plant Molecular Biology Congress, St Louis, Missouri, October 25-29, 2009.

 Jefferson OA, and Jefferson R.A. (2008) Bio Sentinels Project: Biological Technologies to Engineer Pants as Living Instruments to Monitor Natural Resources.  Final Report to the Lemelson Foundation, October 2008.

Presentations