Patent Baristas

At today’s session of BIO’s IPCC Conference, Gregory Morse of the Central Reexamination Unit of the US Patent and Trademark Office gave a presentation of the process for handling re-exams.  Comparing ex parte and inter partes, Morse showed that the time for processing to first action is inching up although inter partes proceedings have not […]

The USPTO has issued “Interim Examination Instructions For Evaluating Subject Matter Eligibility Under 35 U.S.C. § 101” to be used by patent examiners during examination. These instructions supersede previous guidance on subject matter eligibility. These instructions  must be “really” important given the extraordinarily “high” number of “unnecessary” quotation marks.  Maybe the USPTO could benefit from […]

Dealing with the Patent Office is a lot like standing in front of the airline ticket counter where the agent keeps typing in endless strings of random numbers and letters and politely explains that you can’t possibly make a change in your reservation because your ticket is a A389X-27-Purple ticket and not the B347L-Triple-Lindy ticket. […]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has acknowledges that it might have been miscalculating patent term adjustment (PTA) for patents issued from 35 U.S.C. 371 national stage filings. Fish & Richardson and their pharmaceutical client Japan Tobacco Inc. (JT) discovered a significant error in the manner by which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) […]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) ordered the reexamination of Merck’s biggest selling product, Singulair.  The challenged patent, U.S. Patent No. 5,565,473 (“Unsaturated Hydroxyalkylquinoline Acids as Leukotriene Antagonists,” issued October 15, 1996), covers montelukast sodium, the active ingredient in the $4.5 billion-a-year allergy and asthma drug. The request for reexam, No. 90/009,432, was made […]

The Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has combined three patent interferences into a single interference between Sepracor and Wyeth. The interference was declared to determine the priority of inventorship of claims directed to racemic O-desmethylvenlafaxine (ODMV) succinate. Wyeth markets racemic ODMV succinate in the U.S. under […]

Apparently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit could not bear to see an end to the drama between the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and its customers over proposed patent application rules.  The CAFC set out a mixed opinion on the rules proposed by the USPTO saying that they are procedural but […]

Earlier, the Supreme Court ruled that MedImmune could sue Genentech for patent infringement even though MedImmune continued to pay licensing fees to Genentech to use disputed technology to develop the drug Synagis®.  At the same time, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office decided to have a second review of the patents at issue, U.S. Pat. […]