Posts Tagged: "Millennium Pharmaceuticals"

Don’t Let Experts Testify as to Obviousness

When obviousness of a patent claim is at issue, some experts may opine along these lines: “Therefore, the subject matter of claim 1 would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art.” Whether such is common practice or not, testimony of this sort ought not to be allowed. Such testimony should be objected to and stricken as irrelevant. In cases involving a jury, a motion in limine ought to be used to prevent such testimony from coming before a jury. Experts are fact witnesses that are, like all fact and other witnesses, allowed to testify to what they saw, what they heard, and what they did. Unlike other witnesses, however, expert witnesses are further allowed to express opinions within the fields of their expertise. Experts’ expertise comes from having specialized knowledge, education, training, or experience.

Inherent obviousness necessitates specific motivation to modify lead compound in pharma process due to surprising, unexpected results

Inherent obviousness cannot be based on what the inventor thought, and, in addition, the results in a particular case may not be inherently obvious depending on what was expected by a person of ordinary skill. The court pointed out “’the mere fact that a certain thing may result from a given set of circumstances is not sufficient’ to render the results inherent.” Millennium Pharmaceuticals, 2017 WL 3013204, at *6 (citations omitted by author). The court also held that it is never appropriate to consider “what the inventor intended when the experiment was performed,” even though Millennium “conceded as a matter of law that the ester is a ‘natural result’ of freeze-drying bortezomib with mannitol.” Id. Thus, hindsight reasoning should never be applied and, obviousness is “measured objectively in light of the prior art, as viewed by a person of ordinary skill in the invention.”