Stem cell patent skeptics also filed
Pair made claims like those under scrutiny
By KATHLEEN GALLAGHER
kgallagher@journals
Posted: July 25, 2007
Two of the scientists questioning the Wisconsin Alumni Research
Foundation's key embryonic stem cell patents tried to patent similar
discoveries themselves, the foundation said Wednesday.
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Buy a link hereTheir patent applications were made after the
foundation filed patent applications on the work of James Thomson,
the first person to isolate human embryonic stem cells.
Neither of the scientists disclosed their patent applications when
they filed declarations in April in support of two foundations on the
coasts that are trying to have the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
overturn WARF's patents, the Madison-based foundation said.
The two scientists told the patent office that the discoveries
covered by WARF's patents were obvious to anyone familiar with the
field. WARF is questioning why, then, the scientists filed for
similar patents on embryonic stem cells.
Also, one of the scientists failed to tell the patent office her nine
stem cell lines listed on the National Institutes of Health Stem Cell
Registry in 2001 never developed into stem cell lines, the documents
say.
WARF says it disclosed this information to the patent office Tuesday
under what is called the "duty of candor" standard.
"We have an ongoing duty to mention something to the examiner that is
material. Whether it's intentional or not, I don't know. But if it's
incomplete, we have to let the patent office know, 'You don't have
the complete picture on this,' " said Carl Gulbrandsen, WARF's
managing director.
The scientists' past patent applications are not relevant to whether
WARF's patents are valid, said John M. Simpson, stem cell project
director at the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a
consumer watchdog group in Santa Monica, Calif.
Simpson's group a year ago requested re-examination of WARF's patents
with the Public Patent Foundation, a New York group that targets the
patent system.
"There's a consensus view among scientists that this was an obvious
development. I think that's why, without particularly much trouble,
we got stem cell scientists to file affidavits to that effect,"
Simpson said.
Jeanne Loring, at the Burnham Institute in San Diego, didn't
immediately return a reporter's phone calls Wednesday afternoon. An
automatic e-mail response from Alan Trounson of Monash University in
Australia said he was traveling.
Loring and Trounson both said in their declarations supporting the
effort to overturn WARF's patents that the scientific literature made
it obvious someone would be able to isolate human embryonic stem
cells.
"Had I or any other stem cell scientist been given human embryos and
sufficient funding, we could have made the same accomplishment,
because the science required to isolate and maintain human embryonic
stem cells was obvious at the time," Loring said in her declaration.
The lines she was working on in 2001 didn't expand because she was
taken by surprise when the call came out to add them to the list of
approved lines and she "didn't have the luxury of continuing to
culture them" because of a lack of full-time lab people, Loring said
in an interview with the Journal Sentinel last year.
Douglas Melton and Chad Cowan of Harvard University also filed
declarations that support overturning WARF's patents. None of the
four scientists' declarations have any supporting documentation, such
as lab notes, to show that they believed Thomson's work was obvious
in the mid-1990s, Gulbrandsen said.
Also, the first claim in Loring's 1999 patent application was even
broader than Thomson's claims, suggesting she didn't think it was
obvious at the time, Gulbrandsen said.
Loring subsequently abandoned that patent application, Simpson said.
One of Trounson's three embryonic stem cell patent applications was
granted and the other two are pending, according to the patent office
Web site.
http://www.jsonline
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StemCells subscribers may also be interested in these sites:
Children's Neurobiological Solutions
http://www.CNSfoundation.org/
Cord Blood Registry
http://www.CordBlood.com/at.cgi?a=150123
The CNS Healing Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CNS_Healing
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