Intellectual Property & Patents

Myriad Genetics reports that the US Supreme Court has granted certiorari agreeing to hear the company's gene patentability case.

Can postapproval FDA filings immunize pharma companies from patent lawsuits?

India has enforced stricter patent laws compared to other countries. For a drug to be patentable in India, the invention has to be novel, inventive, and industrially applicable.

An in-depth analysis of the patent provisions of the new legislation.

Novavax, Inc. (Rockville, MD) has been issued US Patent No. 7,763,450 for Functional Influenza Virus-Like Particles (VLPs).

Recent patent rulings raise significant patentability questions for DNA sequence inventions.

The Bilski and Classen decisions can render numerous in vitro diagnostic claims unpatentable.

There are several challenges associated with protecting patents for personalized medicines.

Did the 2005 Patents Act engender a Western intellectual property rights culture in the country?

The Chinese government is making consistent efforts to strengthen IP protection.

Nashville–based GenHunter Corporation has been granted a US patent (7,268,116) for a new protein expression technology.

A jury in the US Federal District Court in Boston ruled on October 23, 2007, that Roche's pegylated-erythropoietin (peg-EPO) product, Mircera, infringes 11 Amgen EPO patent claims.

The US Patent & Trademark Office has issued the fifth US patent to MorphoSys AG (Munich, Germany) stemming from MorphoSys’s base HuCAL (human combinatorial antibody library) patent family, providing extended protection to MorphoSys’s core technology.

The August 7, 2007, issue of The Wall Street Journal Patent Scorecard ranks Wyeth (Madison, NJ, www.wyeth.com) first among 35 global pharmaceutical companies evaluated for patent-based intellectual property (IP).

Companies in the biotech industry typically require one or several partners as they complete the product development cycle.

Although IP due diligence is relevant to virtually any transaction between biotech companies, a detailed investigation into IP assets is particularly critical to M&A transactions.

Utility patents are granted to anyone who invents any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, composition of matter, or any new improvement thereof.

The Act will establish third party rights to challenge the validity of a patent through postgrant opposition proceedings.

Generex Biotechnology Corporation (Toronto, Canada, www.generex.com) has received an Australian patent for its micellar system for delivering macromolecules through the buccal lining.

In the US, the patent term is 20 years from the filing date . . . commercial product may lose patent protection just as sales are ramping up.

Only the product that served as the basis of the extension is exclusively covered by the patent during its extended term.

How much of an impact does patent reform, real or imagined, have on biopharmaceutical stocks?

...biopharmaceutical companies still face rampant piracy and counterfeiting of patented products.

Your research and development team has just shouted "Eureka!" after long and expensive years of research, exclaiming they have developed a next-generation pain reliever. What do you do next? This article explores and suggests your next steps and identifies pertinent questions to ask a patent attorney. The focus is on intellectual property; this article does not address the myriad regulatory issues that must be resolved.

by Edward R. Ergenzinger, Jr. and W. Murray Spruill, Alston & Bird, LLP Patents on genes and proteins might be severely ? even retroactively ? affected and lose significant value if the Supreme Court upholds the Appeals Court ruling in the Festo case. Applicants seeking patents may be required to make and test thousands of functional variants and describe them all in patent specifications to claim them. The Supreme Court decision is anticipated this summer.

By Tom Brody, DNAX Research Institute, pp. 38-42. Early sale or offers to sell an invention may result in the rejection of a patent application under 35 U.S.C. 102(b). Such a rejection is called "the on-sale bar," and it permanently prevents patenting of an invention.