After six years as AIPLA Executive Director, Q. Todd Dickinson has announced that he will step down. While he was an effective leader at AIPLA, Todd (the “Q” doesn’t stand for anything) made his mark as the first effective Director of the USPTO in some time, and many thought he would be a good choice to lead the Office a second time when Obama took office.
Q. Todd Dickinson Resigns as Executive Director of AIPLA
July 14th, 2014Myriad Guidance Comments
July 10th, 2014The USPTO is now publishing comments
http://www.uspto.gov/patents/law/comments/myriad-mayo_guidance_comments.jsp
Abbvie V. Janssen Biotech –Written Description Requirement Road Map
July 7th, 2014
The recent decision in Abbvie Deutschland v. Janssen Biotech and Centorcor Biologics, App. No. 2013-1338, -1346 (Fed. Cir. , July 1, 2014) deserves more attention than it has received. (A copy of the decision is available at the end of this post.) The appeal was by Abbvie from a District Court decision entering a judgment of invalidity of Abbvie’s patents on fully humanized antibodies (Abs) to IL-12. Although Abbvie won an interference involving its U.S. Patent No. 6,914,128, a jury found both patents invalid inter alia as failing the written description requirement (“WDR”) of s.112, para. 1.
The “modern” WDR as created in UC v. Lilly and applied in decisions such as U. of Rochester v. Searle and Ariad v. Lilly has been a potent patent-killer, particularly when functional claims are asserted. That is just what Abbvie attempted, e.g.:
Claim 29. A neutralizing isolated human antibody…that binds to human IL-12 and disassociates from human IL-12 with a koff rate constant of 1×10(-2)s(-1) or less, as determined by surface plasmon resonance. See slip. op p.7.
More Questions Than Answers from the PTO
July 2nd, 2014
At the recent BIO International Convention, Deputy Commissioner Andrew Hirschfeld (who chaired the May PTO s.101 Forum) presented seven “Sample Claims” related to biotech/pharma inventions and invited “discussion and feedback” from the interested public. The claims have been posted on the PTO website (and can be found here). I will attempt some commentary on patent-eligibility under the new PTO Guidelines.
6. Antibiotic L, which is expressed by recombinant yeast. (Antibiotic L is secreted by a bacterial species and exhibits antibiotic properties when the bacteria functioning naturally)(Comments in parentheses are my slightly rewritten summaries of the background of the claims provided by the PTO in the slides.)
Patents4Life comments: We know that the Guidelines would require the Examiner to reject a claim to isolated antibiotic L or to a pure strain bacterial culture that would excrete the antibiotic into the medium–both are “natural products.” But in claim 6, a lot more of the hand of man is involved. But wait! This is a product-by-process claim and the PTO ignores process limitations when evaluating the patentability of a compound, and evaluates the compound per se. Now the “answer” turns on whether or not expression from yeast significantly alters the structure of antibiotic L, and we are not told whether or not it does. So the question is unanswerable at this point.
