Patent Baristas

Some have expressed concern that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) hosted a two-day meeting last week to discuss substantive patent law harmonization. The participants, from 22 countries along with the EPO and EC, issued a Statement of Intent noting that they will convene future meetings to consider "issues with regard to intellectual […]

As part of a proposed $2.57 trillion fiscal year 2006 budget request for the USPTO is $1.7 billion, equaling anticipated FY 2006 fee collections from patent and trademark filings. The request represents a $149 million increase over FY 2005, and reflects an anticipated rise in patent and trademark fee collections. As part of the 21st […]

Monsanto Co. has resolved a patent dispute with Bayer CropScience and a German non-profit research organization in a worldwide cross-license deal. This ends a long-standing rift over Agrobacterium technology, a transformation technology used to transfer a gene into a host plant’s DNA with more precision and efficiency than other available methods. Scientists at Monsanto and […]

The United States Patent and Trademark Office revised the policy on when a second or subsequent request for reexamination is filed while an ?earlier filed reexamination? is pending, and the second or subsequent request cites only prior art, which raised a substantial new question of patentability (SNQ) in the pending reexamination proceeding.  See MPEP ? […]

Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc. sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking exclusive rights to sell a generic version of Sanofi-Aventis’ Allegra-D allergy drug. In the suit, Barr is challenging the FDA’s policy of awarding generic exclusivity on a patent-by-patent basis rather than solely to the […]

Under a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) public access policy, which is designed to provide easier access to tax supported research, researchers who receive grant money from the National Institutes of Health will be "asked" to submit their results to a public Web site within a year after they are published in a scientific […]

Law.com reported that the California Supreme Court agreed to review an appellate decision in which a $500 million judgment for City of Hope National Medical Center against Genentech, including $200 million in punitive damages. Genentech negotiated a license agreement to develop and market human insulin and human growth hormone based on research at City of […]

The Cincinnati Enquirer ran an article about a new a state-created venture fund charged with raising $100 million and steering at least half of it into Ohio startup companies. The new company, Buckeye Venture Partners, will be headed by a unit of Western & Southern Financial Group of Cincinnati.  Buckeye Venture Partners will serve as […]