This is a double negative distorted, could bring huge economic consequences, and the Nobel Prize is dependent on the answer: is “non-obviousness” for an invention, and therefore can be patented in the United States – as researchers began to experiment, should not guarantee success that led to the invention?
The U.S. court of appeals for the federal circuit today heard at the heart of a case in Washington, d.c., about the use of revolutionary genomic editors, commonly known as CRISPR. The two-year intellectual property dispute has brought lawyers from the university of California (UC) to file lawsuits against lawyers at the broad institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two teams represent several institutions of the team, they claim to have made key findings, make natural bacteria used as immune mechanism of CRISPR accurately cut mammalian genome – these technologies could eventually pave the way for new medical treatments. The invention has spawned several companies, many of whom are expected to bring Nobel prizes to key scientists.
In April 2014, the Broad institute obtained the first of several licensed patents used by CRISPR’s mammalian cells, which is a competition between UC lawyers and the U.S. patent and trademark office. But in February 2017, the patent trial and appeal board (PTAB) ruled that the Broad institute accepted. Today at a hearing, the length is less than 45 minutes, the university of California system lawyers claim PTAB when explaining “non-obvious” made a “mistake” law, and requires the court of appeal for canceling the decision or – this is more likely – the case back to the PTAB to reconsider its decision. “UC does its best to deal with their CARDS, but UC is still not good for UC,” said Jacob Sherkow, a visiting scholar at Stanford university law school in palo alto, California.
The UC team claims that it has no legal disputes, and claims it has transformed CRISPR from a natural bacterial mechanism into a basic invention of the lab’s genome editing tool. Originally published in June 28, 2012, a report by the university of California, Berkeley, Jennifer Du Dena and Emmanuel Xia Peng teal, then with Sweden’s umea university (now) with the Max Planck institute for infection of the Berlin institute for biological studies described in the online scientific papers. The focus of the controversy is that who will be transferred to the system in mammalian cells is commendable, it is a on January 3, 2003 by Broad Feng Zhang and colleagues in another online science describing the feat of paper – for the first time in UC group and other researchers published a few weeks before the similar experiments. UC researchers say testing the system in mammalian cells is obvious, although it does not guarantee it will work. As the university’s chief counsel in the hearing recently issued a press release this morning, broad and others use “traditional, off-the-shelf tools” to indicate CRISPR can cut DNA in eukaryotic cells. UC believes that PTAB mistakenly endorses a Broad decision on the fact that it does not guarantee the success of the eukaryote experiment, which means that Broad meets the non-obvious criteria.
“There is some debate about the true end of PTAB,” Sherkow said. Today, a judge of the three judges team seem to believe that “really obsessed with PTAB describe the standard of the non-obvious way,” one of the very demanding of UC “, the third only that no tendency of technical problems are put forward. “If you intend to obstruct [the appeal], I still think it supports Broad.” Sherkow said.
“We are more confident that the federal circuit will confirm the PTAB decision,” Mr. Broad said in a statement after the hearing.
At the university of California law consultant and vice President of legal affairs, Charles f. Robinson also confidence in a statement said: “today, we put forward a convincing argument, namely PTAB committed several errors of law, including ignoring the Supreme Court and the federal circuit court precedent. Based on today’s questions, we are optimistic that the court has serious doubts about the PTAB decision. ”
A federal appeals court usually takes months to issue a ruling.