From The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in California and The Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) via Jon Merz comes the most important news in stem cell research since 2000:

PTO REJECTS HUMAN STEM CELL PATENTS AT BEHEST OF CONSUMER GROUPS:

Santa Monica, CA — April 2, 2007 — The U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office has upheld challenges by consumer advocates to three
over-reaching patents on human embryonic stem cells and rejected patent
claims by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the
Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR) said today.

“This is a a great day for scientific research,” said John M. Simpson.
FTCR stem cell project director. “Given the facts, this is the only
conclusion the PTO could have reached. The patents should never have
been issued in the first place.”

The challenges were filed last July by FTCR and the Public Patent
Foundation (PUBPAT) because the three WARF patents were impeding
scientific progress and driving vital stem cell research overseas.
FTCR and PUBPAT argued that the work done by University of Wisconsin
researcher James Thomson to isolate stem cell lines was obvious in the
light of previous scientific research, making his work unpatentable. To
receive a patent, something must be new, useful and non-obvious. The PTO
agreed with the groups.

Its decision said, “It would have been obvious to one skilled in the art
at the time the invention was filed to the method of isolating ES cells
from primates and maintaining the isolated ES cells on feeder cells for
periods longer than one year. A person skilled in the art would have
been motivated to isolate primate (human) ES cells, and maintained in
undifferentiated state for prolonged periods, since ES cells are
pluripotential and can be used in gene therapy.”

The PTO decisions were dated Friday, March 30 but were received today.
WARF has two months to respond to the PTO ruling and seek to change it.
Third party requests for patent re-examination, like the ones filed by
FTCR and PUBPAT, are ultimately successful in having the subject patent
either changed or completely revoked roughly 70% of the time.

Dr. Jeanne Loring, a stem cell researcher at the Burnham Institute for
Medical Research, filed statements in support of the re-examination
requests.

“The real discovery of embryonic stem cells was by Martin Evans, Matt
Kaufman, and Gail Martin in 1981, and none of these scientists
considered patenting them,” said Loring. “It is outrageous that WARF
claimed credit for this landmark discovery nearly 15 years after it was
made.”

In the face of the challenges by FTCR and PUBPAT WARF announced in
January that it would ease its licensing requirements on human embryonic
stem cells.

“Now that the PTO has ruled, WARF should simply drop all its claims,”
said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT Executive Director. [ed: yeah, hold your breath indeed…]

The groups said the patents’ dubious validity is underscored by the fact
that no other country in the world honors them. As a result, U.S.
researchers have sent research monies abroad where they can avoid paying
royalties to WARF.

California voters approved the nation’s largest publicly funded stem
cell research program in 2004 with Proposition 71, which allocated $3
billion in grants over the next 10 years.

More information about FTCR and PUBPAT’s challenges to the WARF stem
cell patents (U.S. Patents Nos. 5,843,780, 6,200,806 and 7,029,913),
including copies of the Patent Office’s Orders rejecting the patents,
can be found here, and you canr ead John Simpson’s Op-Ed explaining the need for the patent challenges
here.

Labels: patents, stem cell research, WARF, Wisconsin