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This year Congress gave business owners a new tool to combat theft of their trade secrets: the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016, Public Law No: 114-153 (18 U.S.C. 1836(b)) (“DTSA”). Even prior to DTSA, theft of trade secrets was a federal offense under 18 U.S.C.1832 (“Theft of Trade Secrets”)(“ToTS”), exposing offenders to penalties up to $5 million. However, only the U.S. Attorney General was authorized to take action against wrongdoers under this statute, so victims of trade secret theft hoping for compensation or enforcement when the AG would not act had to rely on state law. DTSA now gives victims of trade secret misappropriation a right of private action, with a remedy not available under state l

For clinical therapeutics, there is a great need to develop new approaches to fight chronic and incurable diseases and further improve the efficiency of medical treatments. The current research focus and opportunities for nanomedicine in therapeutics include the development of rapid and accurate analytical techniques, safe and targeted drug delivery systems, improved controlled drug release systems, and the discovery of alternative and innovative therapeutic methods. In this article, I will specifically discuss the use of nanoparticles for drug delivery.

The Supreme Court has denied the petition for certiorari in Ariosa v. Sequenom, dashing hopes that it would reconsider the patent subject matter eligibility strictures on medical diagnostics and other technologies established by the scope of its Myriad, Mayo, and Alice rulings. As we reported previously, Sequenom petitioned the court in March of this year, asking:

Whether a novel method is patent-eligible where: (1) a researcher is the first to discover a natural phenomenon; (2) that unique knowledge motivates him to apply a new combination of known techniques to that discovery; and (3) he thereby achieves a previously impossible result without preempting other uses of the discovery?

After undertaking its first post-grant review (PGR) since the passage of the America Invents Act (AIA), the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) invalidated two patents last Monday. Citing the 2014 Alice decision, the board ruled that patents 8,660,888 and 8,725,557 claimed patent-ineligible abstract ideas, and that the ‘557 patent was obvious over the prior art.
The patents had been granted to Leachman Cattle of Colorado LLC. In its petition for review, the American Simmental Association challenged that Leachman’s method of “determining an animal’s relative economic value based on its genetic and physical traits” was not patent eligib

William R. Reid, Partner at Dilworth IP, will be hosting a FREE webinar on Wednesday, July 20th at 1:00 PM (EDT). This entry in the Dilworth IP Webinar Series is entitled Now that the Dust has Settled for the AIA – Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, and Where We Need to Go, and will focus on the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) of 2012. The AIA is widely recognized as causing the most significant change to the U.S. patent system since 1952, and Mr. Reid will consider its impact on both patent procurement and enforcement. In particular, he will address the trends in the new post-grant proceedings, the significant issues which still need further clarification from the Federal Circuit, and the potential additions/corrections to the AIA to expect in the future. This presentation will provide patent practitioners and owners with the information they need to guide their patent strategies in light of the AIA as well as looking at how the AIA has been applied over the last three years, with an eye toward some of its ongoing issues.

Anthony D. Sabatelli, PhD, and Frederick A. Spaeth, Partners at Dilworth IP, are presenting a talk on “Intellectual Property Considerations for Entrepreneurs.” Their talk will be part of a series of training seminars offered by the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (“YEI”) to their summer fellow venture teams. The event will take place today, Monday, June 13th at YEI, 254 Elm Street in New Haven, CT. Dilworth IP is a corporate partner of YEI.

Dilworth IP partner, Frederick Spaeth, will serve as a panelist at the 2016 Connecticut Business Expo in Hartford, CT this Thursday. This annual, one-day event provides a venue for thousands of business executives from across the state to showcase their products and services. The day will consist of a series of educational sessions moderated and paneled by experts from a variety of industries. Fred’s session, “Building a Great Brand Name,” will focus on the branding process, with his talk emphasizing the selection and securitization of a brand name.

Dilworth IP will be sponsoring CURE at the BIO International Convention in San Francisco. The event, which will be held from Monday, June 6th through Thursday, June 9th at the Moscone Center, brings together over 15,000 biotechnology and pharma leaders from across the world for a week of intense educational programs, exhibitions and networking opportunities. The keynote address this year will be given by Will Smith and Dr. Bennet Omalu and will be entitled “Knowledge Precipitates Evolutio

Like most other high-school students, I struggled with SAT vocabulary. Let’s face it, even voracious readers rarely encounter “susurration,” “verisimilitude,” or “eleemosynary.” Apparently, however, no 10th grader could hope to enter college without understanding them. I therefore cringed to read “conflate” in the Federal Circuit’s decision in Intelligent Bio-Systems v. Illumina Cambridge (decided May 9, 2016). According to Webster’s (not so) New Collegiate Dictionary (1977), “conflate” can mean “to bring together” or “fuse.” However, it can also mean “to confuse.” Yet another meaning is “to combine (as two readings of a text) into a composite whole.” Confused, I turned to Black’s Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition (1990), but alas, “conflate” appears to have no special meaning in the law.

With the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in 2010, preventive medicine – services that focus on disease prevention, rather than disease treatment – became a major focus of healthcare and the market for medical diagnostics expanded to meet a growing demand. During the same time, faster and less expensive next-generation DNA sequencing (NGS) and improvements in cloud storage, which facilitated the analysis of sequence data, boosted the development of microbiome-based diagnostics.