Blog

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.

Dilworth IP is proud to have been a sponsor for the fifty-five Connecticut students who traveled to the National Invention Convention and Entrepreneurship Expo (NICEE) in Washington, D.C. A ceremony was held by Governor Dannel Malloy on Friday, May 20th at the State’s Capitol to see the young inventors off as they headed to the event. Dilworth IP’s Frederick Spaeth, who was present for the ceremony, said “it was a such a pleasure to see so much enthusiasm from the students as they headed to the convention. I think the event is a fantastic way to teach the practical process of protecting their creative ideas.”

This is the third article in a review series of “Nanomedicine: A Vast Horizon on a Molecular Landscape”. In Part I we discussed the major research and development areas in the field. Then, we briefly introduced some representative research groups and companies and their patents in nanomedicine (Part II). Here, we will start the discussion about the diagnostic applications of nanomedicine.

Over the past year our firm has been reporting on major intellectual property developments and the R&D and commercialization efforts in the microbiome. The importance of this scientific area for bringing new drug therapies to the marketplace has now been given a big shot in the arm by the US government. On Friday, May 13, the White House launched a public-private coalition “to foster the integrated study of microbiomes across different ecosystems.” This expansive R&D effort comes with $121 million of funding from the federal government, with another $100+ million of investments from academia and the private sector.

On Wednesday, President Obama signed the Defend Trade Secrets Act. His action follows the bill’s passage in Congress, which we previously reported here: /trade-secrets-bill-passes-house-goes-white-house/

In a signing ceremony in the Oval Office, President Obama recognized the legislation’s historic importance, commenting that the law “for the first time will provide civil actions for companies or individuals that are stealing trade secrets from our American innovators[1].”

Mark A. Thomas, partner at Dilworth IP, will be hosting a FREE webinar on Wednesday, June 8th at 1:00 PM (EDT). This session, entitled Two Years After Alice – A Challenging Adventure for Software Patents, will discuss the aftermath of the 2014 Supreme Court decision in Alice Corp v. CLS Bank International. Alice has grown beyond a less than satisfying Supreme Court decision to become the most significant threat to billions of dollars in software patents. This webinar will be of particular benefit to in-house counsel as it will explore recent Patent Office guidance and federal court decisions with a practical focus on protecting software and getting more patents allowed under evolving Alice standards. The webinar will also touch on the impact of Alice and how it has changed the legal landscape.

Dilworth IP is sponsoring the 2016 Biotech Bootcamp which will be hosted by the Yale Office of Cooperative Research and will be held at Evans Hall in New Haven, CT on Thursday May 12th. This one-day workshop seeks to educate Yale faculty and researchers on how to commercialize their ideas for drug discovery and biological therapeutics, with an emphasis on engaging pharmaceutical and venture capital firms by creating “fundable ideas.” The keynote speakers this year are Crystal McKellar, Managing Director & General Council at Mithril Capital and George Yancopoulos, President of Regeneron Research Laboratories.

On Wednesday, April 27, the House of Representatives voted 410-2 to approve the Defend Trade Secret Act (S. 1890). The bipartisan measure, which is supported by the White House, is expected to be signed into law in the coming days.

On May 5th, the US Patent and Trademark Office published an update to the Interim Guidance titled “May 2016 Subject Matter Eligibility Update” to provide its examining corps with additional guidelines for determining subject matter eligibility under 35 USC §101.

The publication includes a memorandum, “Formulating a Subject Matter Eligibility Rejection and Evaluating the Applicant’s Response to a Subject Matter Eligibility Rejection,” which “seeks to improve examiner correspondence with regard to subject matter eligibility rejections.” It was issued in response to public comments.