Drug patent structure dispute continues

Abstract

A nearly three-year intellectual property disagreement over a promising anticancer agent continues. In 2014, Kim Janda of Scripps Research Institute California discovered that ONC201, a drug candidate under development at Oncoceutics, had been patented with an incorrect chemical structure. Scripps applied for a new patent on the compound with the correct structure and licensed it to another company, Sorrento Therapeutics (C&EN, June 9, 2014, page 32). On Jan. 31 of this year, the Patent & Trademark Office reissued Oncoceutics’s first ONC201 anticancer patent with a corrected chemical structure. But this doesn’t mean the dispute is over. Janda argues that Scripps’s application for a composition-of-matter patent, which would grant rights to the molecule itself, would take precedence over Oncoceutics’s corrected method-of-treatment patent, which grants rights to the molecule’s applications. In such cases, a company can’t legally profit from the use of a patent-protected substance without licensing it from its owner. Scripps’s