Attached you will find the newsletter from DHS Patentanwalts GmbH, provided to us by Dr. Stefan Danner.
In the last few months, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has handed down several decisions relating to the grant and validity of supplementary protection certificates (SPCs; i.e. patent term extensions). Thereof, the following rulings are generally considered to have significant impact on IP strategies in the pharmaceutical industry.
I spent a day or two looking back over the breaking IP news that resulted in posts on Patents4Life. I wrote most of them, but want to take a pause to thank regular contributors Paul Cole, Ron Schutz and Stefan Danner for their help. Patents4Life was originally intended to be a “blawg” focused on IP developments affecting the Life Sciences and, as 2011 comes to a close, I have put together a “top ten” list of stories to which attention had to be paid – by all of us in most cases – litigators, prosecutors and tech transfer professionals in the U.S. and abroad. The single most-apparent trend in IP last year was the increasing globalization of IP law – consider inter-office work-sharing and the prosecution highway. But I don’t want this column to go on into 2012, so here, in reverse order, are the “legal events” that dominated the netwaves in 2011. (I apologize for what I hope will be minor errors of fact and spelling – I am writing this from notes I made while back-tracking through the year.)
10. The Stem Cell Suits. In Sherley v. Sebelius, the district court finally dismissed the suit which had resulted in a ban on Federal funding for stem cell research, after the Court of appeals reversed its initial decision. (See Post, July 28th). However, in October, the Court of Justice of the EU ruled that claims to embryonic stem cells or even to cells that could become sources for embryonic stem cells were not patentable. (See post, Oct. 18th). Some types of gene therapy were indicated to be allowable. The future of embryonic stem cells is cloudy with a chance of further retreats like Geron’s.
9. On October 18th, Saint-Gobain petitioned for cert., urging the Supreme Court to answer a burden of proof question that comes down to: “Does holding a patent on an improvement on a patented invention that does not literally infringe insulate the accused infringer from infringement under the doctrine of equivalents?” This question has been simmering under the surface of infringement law for decades, the Fed. Cir. is clearly divided and the Supreme Court might bite. See Post of March 8, 2011 as well as October 14th post.
The Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) has petitioned the Supreme Court to review the Fed. Cir.’s opinion of July 29th, that isolated BRCA DNA sequences are patentable subject matter. Its brief (a copy available at the end of this post) contains little that is new in the way of argumentation, and relies heavily on the “rule” it found in Chakrabarty that a composition of matter must possess markedly new characteristics upon isolation, as compared to its naturally-occurring state, in order to be patent eligible.
But as the year closes, let’s take a minute to mourn what was lost in July. As I noted in my July 31st post on the decision, “The one hundred plus pages of opinion spent only about five pages on the ‘diagnostic’ method claims….Judge Lourie took care to distinguish the transformative elements of the claims at issue in the Prometheus decision from the minimalist Myriad method claims.” In fact, Judge Lourie found that the method claims which only involve “comparing” and “analyzing” DNA sequences fail the M&T test and are no more than abstract ideas. However, in re-reading the opinion, I was surprised to note that at least one “diagnostic method” claim was also found patent-ineligible. Claim 2 of the ‘857 patent reads:
On December 7th at 10:05 a.m., the Supreme Court heard oral arguments (transcript at end of this post) in the “Prometheus case,” presented by Stephen M. Shapiro of Meyer Brown (Mayo) and Richard P. Bess of Latham & Watkins. Solicitor General Verrilli also argued. In earlier posts on this appeal, e.g., on November 7th, I noted that Mayo’s brief de facto asks the Court to follow the “LabCorp dissent” (548 U.S. 132, 136). In this dissent from a dismissal of cert. as improvidently granted, Justice Breyer, joined by Souter and Stevens, urged the Court to consider that all simple diagnostic tests that correlate a level of a chemical marker (like homocysteine) to a pathology (like a vitamin deficiency) are no more than impermissible attempts to patent natural phenomena: “[T]he process is no more than an instruction to read some numbers in light of medical knowledge.”
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The commentary presented herein represents the opinions of the author and not of Schwegman Lundberg & Woessner, P.A. or any other employee thereof. This commentary is provided for general informational and discussion purposes and should not be considered to be, or used as, legal advice to address any particular situation.
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