Maurice Valla

IP Provisions of the TPP May Not Satisfy the Pharmaceutical Industry

By Maurice Valla on November 30, 2015 Posted in Uncategorized

On October 5, 2015, agreement was reached on the text for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. The 12 signatories (United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Chile, and Peru) now have two years to ratify the agreement in order for it to take effect. The White House released the … Continue Reading

Australian High Court Rules Gene Patents Unpatentable

By Maurice Valla on October 28, 2015 Posted in Uncategorized

Decision reverses decades of precedent and calls into question the validity of literally thousands of issued Australian patents Like the U.S. Supreme Court, the High Court of Australia has determined that Myriad’s patents directed to purified and isolated DNA molecules encoding the BRCA genes are unpatentable. Indeed, the High Court of Australia went one step … Continue Reading

Did Recent Changes in the Patent Laws Turn the Page on the Need for Accurate Laboratory Notebooks?

By Tracy Palovich, Ph.D., Maurice Valla and Aaron Rabinowitz on September 21, 2015 Posted in Uncategorized

With the enactment of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA), the U.S. patent system moved to a “first inventor to file” approach for examining all applications having an effective filing date on or after March 16, 2013. Under the new law, in most circumstances it is no longer possible to remove a critical prior art … Continue Reading

What Constitutes Patentable Subject Matter in Biotechnology?

By Maurice Valla on July 8, 2015 Posted in Uncategorized

With its recent (June 12, 2015) decision in Ariosa v. Sequenom, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the Northern District of California’s broad interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Prometheus v. Mayo holding that claims directed to the mere application of naturally occurring products and phenomena constitute unpatentable subject matter. Sequenom’s U.S. … Continue Reading