In response to recent court cases, the USPTO has dramatically revised its approach to dealing with a wide variety of patents. Its new guidelines to patent examiners on subject matter eligibility for inventions involving natural products seem to go way beyond the legal decisions on which they are allegedly based, adding extremely high barriers to patentability. If your invention uses natural products, as almost every tangible invention does to some degree, you now must show that what you claim is “significantly different” that what might be found in nature or from natural phenomena. This vague requirement gives examiners a new club. I’ve already seen it abused.
One client from a previous employer of mine was on the verge of having her patent allowed, but instead just received a ridiculous rejection based on the new guidelines. Â The invention is a real breakthrough in consumer products that replaces a potentially harmful active ingredient with a novel formulation of several natural compounds with unexpected benefits. The value of the invention is potentially huge, but the examiner notes that since all the ingredients are natural and not significantly different from what can be found in nature, the overall invention is not patentable. End of story. I hope this examiner doesn’t realize that every atom, electron, and photon used in any invention can be found in nature.
Those in the biotech industry are highly agitated by this development. “IP Practitioners ‘Horrified’ by USPTO Guidelines on Myriad” is a recent article from Managing IP Magazine with the following:
Sherry Knowles, principal at Knowles Intellectual Property Strategies [said]:
I think the guidelines that were promulgated by the Patent Office are horrifying to the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. That is probably the nicest thing I could say about them. According to the utility guidelines that came out in March this year, not only is no natural product patentable in the US, arguably derivatives of natural products may also not be patentable. That is a clear change in the law.
She said the guidelines include a number of questions to find out if something is patentable. The first is: is it a natural product and does it include chemicals derived from natural sources such as antibiotics and proteins. Knowles noted that 47% of drugs over the past 30 years include derivatives of natural products.
“According to the guidelines, if it is not a natural product you look at whether it is ‘markedly different’ from the natural product. That’s the test. Of course that is clear as mud and that will be defined over time in case law. But let’s say two-thirds of approved drugs that are derived from natural products are markedly different you are still down to 390 drugs over the past 30 years that arguably under the utility guidelines are not patentable. I find that horrifying. I am very concerned,” she said.
These new guidelines, as well as the questionable court cases behind them, reflect a growing anti-patent mentality among our judges, politicians, and bureaucrats. We need to educate a new generation to understand that intellectual property is a critical tool to lift all boats by encouraging innovation and the sharing of secret knowledge obtained by inventors. We need to reverse the popular trend of pointing to patents and trolls as the biggest barriers to progress, when it is not that way at all. Sound patents, properly examined and granted, encourage innovation and lead to gains in knowledge for all.