Patent Law

Marked

By Gary Odom and Jordan Kuhn

Thursday, Stanford University had three HIV-monitoring patents invalidated in summary judgment, letting Roche off the hook. Northern California Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled that the Stanford patents were obvious in light of a 1991 prior art article.

The patents: 5,968,730; 6,503,705; and 7,129,041, relied upon using HIV RNA as a surrogate marker for monitoring the effectiveness of treatment against HIV. The 1991 Journal of Infectious Diseases article suggested using HIV RNA as a marker.

There had been an ownership dispute. Stanford claimed that the three named inventors were employed by the university at the time of invention, thus Stanford owned the rights. But Roche had asserted the work was a joint collaboration between Stanford and Cetus. Roche claimed it had acquired the rights to the patents through purchase of a Cetus subsidiary. Moot point now.

The vast majority of patents granted prior to the landmark 2007 Supreme Court ruling known as Obzilla (KSR v. Teleflex) are invalid as obvious.

Full post as published by The Patent Prospector on June 01, 2008 (boomark / email).