Posts Tagged: "medical diagnostics"

In a research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), evidence emerged that a higher expression of the GIRK1 protein in malignant tissue samples was linked to higher relapse and mortality rates in breast cancer patients who have gone through surgery. The novel use of the GIRK1 protein as a biomarker could have a great impact on breast cancer diagnostics and treatments and further research could yield more discovery on the interdependence of GIRK1 with other important biological pathways critical to cancer management… Unfortunately, discovery of GIRK1 as a biomarker for breast cancer diagnostics would run into 35 U.S.C. § 101, the basic threshold statute for determining patentability of subject matter, under the Supreme Court’s March 2012 ruling in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. In that case, the Court held that processes involving correlations between blood test results and patient health is not patent-eligible subject matter because the process incorporates laws of nature. This would seemingly render any processes involving the application of GIRK1 as a biomarker for breast cancer prognoses unpatentable as well as the expression of GIRK1 occurs naturally.

Those who make the argument that medical software is abstract, or trivial, are just wrong. Medical software has been developed to benefit both patients and medical practitioners by providing better diagnostics, which ultimately lead to new and better treatments… In the context of medical technology, the proper evaluation and effective treatment of patients depend upon complex correlations assessed over prescribed times. This, in turn, relies upon the generation of predictive models from a comparison of an individual patient’s signs and symptoms against a database of studied human wellness parameters, which contain patterns of diagnosis, chosen treatment, and outcome. These efforts are far from trivial.

On May 6, 2016, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office released new life science examples on subject matter eligibility (Examples 28-32, consecutively numbered after the previously released USPTO examples). Examples 28 and 30 illustrate the application of the “markedly different” and “significantly more” analysis to nature-based products. Examples 29 and 31 illustrate the USPTO approach to the eligibility analysis of diagnostic claims, which has been much anticipated. Finally, Examples 32 and 33 illustrate the use of a streamlined eligibility analysis. At first glance, the new life science examples, which identify most of the presented hypothetical claims as patent-eligible, provide several teaching points for achieving patent-eligibility in commonly encountered situations in the life sciences area.

In 2015, Samsung Electronics earned a total of 5,072 patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a slight increase from the 4,936 U.S. patents which the company took home in 2014. Including design and utility patents, Samsung has already taken in 2,017 U.S. patents since the beginning of 2016, an incredible pace which would blow past the firm’s 2015 totals if it holds up all year. As the text cluster from Innography shows us here, much of this recent research and development has focused on semiconductor devices, memory devices and display panels.

Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) of Chicago, IL, is poised to surge ahead in the global point-of-care medical diagnostics industry by acquiring Alere Inc. (NYSE:ALR) of Waltham, MA, in a $5.8 billion deal which values Alere at $56 per share. According a recent statement made by Abbott CEO Miles White to investors, the move will push the company’s annual diagnostic sales up to $7 billion. The acquisition is simply the latest major move in the medical device industry, a sector which saw more than 1,000 deals pending or completed last year for a net worth of $58.9 billion, according to statistics published by Bloomberg Business.

Our latest survey of patents issued recently to Canon include a couple of imaging technologies related to medical diagnostics, such as is the case with the imaging innovation outlined within U.S. Patent No. 9230319, entitled Method of Reconstructing a Biological Tissue Image, and Method and Apparatus for Acquiring a Biological Tissue Image. It protects a method of reconstructing an image of a sample through the use of multiple measured spectra obtained by measuring respective regions of the sample; the method involves acquiring an image through utilization of an intensity distribution in the regions of at least one peak in each of the measured spectra as well as a classifier. This technique is useful in the examination of biological tissues to determine the presence of cancer.

This is a really important question both with respect to biologics and other interventions and also as the Federal Circuit does work with the Supreme Court’s body of precedents. We have basically two principle points. One is that in our view the Federal Circuit has to do a better job rationalizing and reconciling two different sets of precedent. One is the set of modern cases and the second is an older case that the modern cases embrace, Diamond vs. Diehr, which as we understand it adopts exactly the opposite rule from the Federal Circuit in this case, which is that the combination is what has to be new not the individual processes. And then second we believe that we have a case that fits squarely within what the Supreme Court intended to remain patent eligible after those more modern cases. So we filed an en banc petition and we thought that there would be amicus support for sure. But what we didn’t expect, to be honest, was the outpouring of interest and support that we received.

As the amici correctly argue, the panel’s decision striking down Sequenom’s noninvasive prenatal test strikes at the very heart of the patent system. Revolutionary diagnostic testing methods that cost tens of millions of dollars to produce should be the flagship of the modern patent system. But the panel’s misapplication of Mayo calls into doubt many meritorious inventions that benefit us all. Moreover, the panel’s reasoning simply cannot be squared with several innovations that the Supreme Court has historically upheld as proper statutory subject matter. Hopefully the entire Federal Circuit will agree to take up this important case so that vital innovations such as Sequenom’s patented method continue to be produced.

IBM is involved with the development of medical technologies for fields other than oncology, as is evidenced by the issue of U.S. Patent No. 9064306, which is titled Bidirectional Blood Vessel Segmentation. The method for segmenting blood vessels protected here involves receiving an angiogram frame, processing the angiogram frame by applying a Butterworth bandpass filter to suppress high and low frequency background noise, performing both bottom-up filtering and top-down segmentation of the angiogram frame and repeating that process until the results of the top-down segmentation from consecutive iterations equals or exceeds a threshold value. This process is useful for the analysis of angiogram images captured through cardiac catheterization as it can reduce the amount of feedback noise in those images.