EDITOR’S LETTER

Plenty of action in the life sciences field

“Similarly coming a cropper at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit are antibody claims.”

This Spring edition of LSIPR features an eclectic range of topics, many of which top the agenda for life sciences companies.

The challenge faced by digital health pioneers is explored in detail (page 7). Looking closely at two US precedential opinions involving bioinformatics, lawyers from Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner warn that the curse of inventions that combine the digital and real worlds—in terms of patent eligibility—looms large over this fast-growing field.

Similarly coming a cropper at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit are antibody claims (page 8). The decision in this year’s Aventisub was the latest in a series of cases that have followed 2017’s controversial ruling in Amgen v Sanofi, continuing the hostility towards broad “functional” claims in that space.

Regarding the biggest issue of our times, the COVID-19 pandemic, we feature an interesting development involving a Wuhan lab and a patent application for Gilead’s remdesivir. In one of LSIPR’s most-read articles of 2021, Thomas Moga of Dykema looks at how the application pits Wuhan’s Institute of Virology against the US pharma giant, and the part that China’s new patent laws might play (page 11).

Elsewhere we look at patent filing strategies for pharma startups (page 15), the non-obviousness test when applied to AI inventions (page 10), and the European Patent Office’s updated examination guidelines (page 12).

These are just a few highlights among many, and I hope you enjoy the issue.

Tom Phillips is the editor of LSIPR

Image: shutterstock.com / Matej Kastelic