As you will recall, in Prometheus v. Mayo, the Supreme Court held that a claim reciting a natural law had to have other non-conventional steps to pass muster under s. 101. The natural law in Mayo was the correlation between the concentration of the metabolite of the immunosuppressive drug and the efficacy of the drug – unpleasant side effects at the high end of the recited range and lack of efficacy at the low end. The Mayo Court wrote: “We need not, and do not, decide whether were the steps at issue here less conventional, these features of the claims [the administering, determining and recognition steps] would prove sufficient to invalidate them.” It was unnerving that the invalidated claims were method-of-treatment claims.
In his opinion in a Hatch-Waxman litigation involving the anti-schizophrenia drug Iloperidone, Vanda Pharms., Inc. v. Roxane Labs., Inc., Civil Action No. 13-1973-GMS; 14-757-GMS (D.Del., 2016), Judge Sleet upheld the validity of the compound and the method claims in Reissue Patent No. 39,198 and US Patent No. 8,586,610. Continue reading
t posted on this case in September 2014, and urge you to find the post and the district court’s opinion in the Archives. It provides a good – well, adequate– description of the patented technology, which is a method to automatically animate lip synchronization and facial expression of 3D animated characters. This art area has as much jargon as biotech, and I am not going to try to explain what a morph target, a phoneme or a visme is. The claimed method, which used pre-set “rules” to get animated characters to speak with the appropriate facial expressions, was certainly a great advance over using artists to adjust these activities by hand across a wide range of facial expressions and voices.
