PerkinElmer Informatics, Inc. patented a “Draw-ahead feature for chemical structure drawing applications.”
Albeit usefull at times, I often turn off the type-ahead / Quick-Type feature on my iPhone to prevent embarasing errors. I would likely turn off a draw-ahead feature just in case too.
August 18, 2017
August 15, 2017
* Numbers include RCE reworks that substantially reduce the delay of organic chemistry patent applications.
† Report last updated on June 30, 2017.
See also: PatentlyO Post
August 8, 2017
A Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) panel reversed the district court’s holding that Millennium’s licensed patent, U.S. Patent No. 6,713,446 (“the ‘446 Patent”) was invalid for being obvious. The ‘446 Patent claimed a lyophilized mannitol ester prodrug of Bortezomib (See Claim 20). Claim 20 was not obvious according to the panel because, among other reasons, the inventors unexpectedly “discovered that the reason for the dramatic improvement in dissolution and stability for this formulation was the formation of a new chemical compound during lyophilization: the claimed ester of bortezomib and mannitol.”
Earlier, the district court concluded that the new compound was obvious reasoning that Bortezomib was already known (U.S. Patent No. 5,780,454), Lyophilization is already known known, and that the claimed compound is “the inherent result of an allegedly obvious process” of lyophilizing bortezomib and mannitol together.
July 17, 2017
Canada’s Supreme Court strengthened patent protection for brand-named-drug makers.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i28/Canadas-Supreme-Court-boosts-protection.html
C&EN recently published an interesting article on Orion Engineered Carbons GbmH and its strategy of making and selling the most sophisticated grades of carbon black it can.
Carbon Black is a is a material produced by the incomplete combustion of heavy petroleum products. It is widely used as reinforcing filler material for rubber. [Tires, tire treads, cable sheathing, hoses, drive belts, conveyor belts, roll coverings, shoe soles, sealing rings, profiles, and damping elements.] Carbon black is also used as a pigment. That’s not surprising given its name.
A recent carbon black patent issued to Orion is US 8,735,488.
Claim 1. A carbon black, characterized in that the CTAB surface area is from 100 to 160 m2/g, the quartile ratio is greater than 1.60, and the FP index is >0.
The Doctrine of Equivalence is alive and well. For the chemical arts, the CAFC recently suggested that the “Insubstantial Differences” test may be more suitable than a “Function-Way-Result” Test.
See Christopher E. Loh’s post for Fitzpatrick, Cella, Harper & Scinto
May 12, 2017 – [Looking back to 2008 case]
When is and “and?” When is and “or?” That sounds silly. But reading Chisum on Patents in the law library reminded me of one of the holdings in the topiramate litigation of Ortho-McNeil v. Mylan, 520 F.3d 1358 (Fed. Cir. 2008), in which the meaning of and was taken seriously. While most dictionary definitions of “and” are additive, dictionary definitions also show use of “and” to “connote alternatives.”
In the Ortho-McNeil v. Mylan case, the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit (CAFC) held that the term “and,” in Ortho-McNeil’s claim [US Pat. No. 4,513,006 “Anticonvulsant Sulfamate Derivatives”] was used to connote alternatives rather than in the additive sense.
Ortho-McNeil’s US Pat. No. 4,513,006 claimed a genus of sulfamates covering Topiramate. The disputed clause stated: “R2, R3, R4, and R5 are independently hydrogen or lower alkyl and R2 and R3 and/or R4 and R5 together may be a group of formula (II).” (Emphasis added) [A full copy of claim 1 appears below.]
The CAFC said that the two subsets did not need to simultaneously exist. The claim was not limited to compounds that were in both subsets because, construed in context, the claim to compounds that were of a first subset “and” a second subset covered compounds that were either in the first group “or” the second subset.
Here “and” meant to “join alternatives” because, in this case, the claim did not use the word “and” in isolation. Rather, the claim used “and” in a larger context with clarifying adverbs “independently” and “together.”
The CAFC distinguished Chef America:
To the contrary, this court and the district court must interpret the term to give proper meaning to the claim in light of the language and intrinsic evidence. Giving and its most common dictionary meaning would produce in this case the nonsensical result of not covering topiramate and rendering several other dependent claims meaningless. In Chef America, the only possible interpretation of the claim led to a nonsensical result. This situation is distinguishable because claim 1 can and should be interpreted as the patentees intended, with the meaning of and connoting alternatives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topiramate
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