Matthew Pearson Quoted by Bloomberg BNA on Antibody Patent Claims
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Matthew Pearson, a partner in Akin Gump’s intellectual property practice, has been quoted in the Bloomberg BNA article “Antibody Claims Must Move Toward Structure, Panelists Say,” which reports on a recent biotech IP conference at which Pearson spoke.
The article notes that applicants for antibody patents in the United States are finding it difficult to secure broad functional claims for antibodies and should be claiming structure instead. According to Pearson, several recent court decisions, influenced by advances in science, have caused a rethinking of how to draft antibody-related claims. Antibodies are a class of proteins produced by plasma cells and used by the immune system to protect the body against pathogens.
Pearson said in one of those decisions, AbbVie Deutschland GmbH & Co. v. Janssen Biotech, Inc., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit focused on the requirement that a sufficient description of a genus requires either a “representative number of species” or “structural features common to the members of the genus” and concluded that AbbVie didn’t show a representative number of species or structural features common to the genus.
Pearson was part of the Akin Gump team that represented Janssen Biotech in the case, which you can read more about by clicking here.
