Wisconsin Wins Latest Patent Bout

Abstract

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has upheld a 2006 patent on human stem cells owned by the university-affiliated Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). Two years ago, two nonprofits challenged the patent and two other WARF patents. Last week, the government released an 85-page decision that upholds the patents yet narrows their scope slightly. “We're very pleased,” says WARF's managing director, Carl Gulbrandsen. “We believed from the very beginning that [James] Thomson's discoveries were patentable.” WARF's opponents, including Alan Trounson, now president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, had argued that Thomson's work was obvious when he performed it in the 1990s. But the patent examiner rejected those arguments earlier this week, saying that the published science in the 1990s was too “unpredictable” to lead someone to try making human stem cells with an “expectation of success.” The groups plan to appeal the decision, and rulings on the other two patents are pending.