Patent Baristas

As tipped off by Dennis Crouch’s Patently Obvious blog, the U.S. Government Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) has requested an inter-partes reexamination of U.S. Pat. No. 6,653,104 for an anti-cancer antibody assigned to Immunomedics, Inc.

See the OG Notice here.
(more…)

Well, somehow I managed to miss the next round of American Idol this past Wednesday night and found myself watching 60 Minutes Wednesday night edition, with their interview of Dr. David Graham. Dr. Graham is a senior scientist within the FDA’s Office of Drug Safety and now a whistleblower at the FDA. Graham blames the FDA for allowing dangerous drugs to stay on the market. Specifically, he blames the FDA for not pulling a drug that he claims contributed to the deaths of thousands of Americans. He also points the finger at FDA management for running a dysfunctional organization.
(more…)

Blogger and Patent Attorney Axel H Horns posted a nice review of the recent EU-CREST Committee on “IPR and Research” report. The Committee for Scientific and Technical Research (Crest) is the advisory committee to the Council and the Commission on subjects relating to scientific and technical research and in particular, on the co-ordination of national R&D policies.
(more…)

The Washington Post reported that the USPTO rejected a patent on a human hybrid. Stuart Newman of New York Medical College tried to patent a hybrid designed for use in medical research but not yet created. The USPTO stated that the hybrid would be too closely related to a human to be patentable. The inventor wanted to set a legal precedent barring patents on human-like clones. The rejected patent application, filed in 1997, described a technique for combining human embryo cells with cells from the embryo of a monkey, ape or other animal to create a chimera.
(more…)

It hasn’t a great month for the Big Pharmas when it comes to battling the on-slaught of generics. Despite being the time for Valentines and amore, Pfizer is feeling blue since the Technical Board of Appeal revoked Pfizer’s “Viagra-Patent” EP-0 702 555 by dismissing the appeal against an earlier lost.
(more…)

A U.S. District Court ordered Nobel Prize winner and former Yale University professor John Fenn, 87, to pay Yale $545,000 in royalties and penalties, and pay their legal bills of almost $500,000. While at Yale in the late 1980s, Fenn developed a method for mass spectrometric analysis of chemical compounds in solution concerned with determining the mass or molecular weight of large fragile solute species with greater speed, convenience and accuracy as well as new compositions of matter comprising populations of ions having a multiplicity of charges.

The court called Fenn’s actions “fraud” and “civil theft” when he licensed the rights to U.S. Patent No. 5,130,538 to a company he partly owned, which has generated more than $5 million in royalties and could make several times that by the time the patent expires. While Fenn claimed he believed that he had a right to the patent, the court felt that he had no good-faith basis to believe so and acted to conceal the facts from Yale.

More on the Fenn case here.
(more…)

Well, I have decided to give up my Bio-IP.com site on TypePad and switch to PatentBaristas.com on a new hosting service running on MovableType. I like the idea of having the flexibility of MT and my new hosting service on iPowerWeb provides plenty of bandwidth.

Many thanks to Christina at Moxie Design Studios for helping to set up such a fun site. If you like the new design, drop me a note and let me know what you think. Take a look around, relax over a cup of joe and enjoy.

I’ve been trying out the free service from IPNewsFlash.com that allows you to search for patent families.  You can run a search and get a complete list of its legal status based on INPADOC data.  You just need to enter a valid publication number such as WO03054153, AU775606, US6335169 or DE10196055T and press the "Search"-button.  Of the half-dozen times I’ve used it, it has popped up with all the info I needed on the family tree.

Try it out at: http://www.ipnewsflash.com/family.php