ACT wins patent dispute
The Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences of the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO; Arlington, VA) ruled in mid-March in favor of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT; Worcester, MA) in a dispute involving several patents to which the company holds exclusive license. The patents cover cloning procedures applicable to nonhuman mammals, including three key patents, the first awarded in 1999, to researchers at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst, MA) for their efforts to clone cows. ACT's methods have broad practical application in cloning animals and for introducing genetic modifications into animals for an array of agricultural, animal science, companion animal, and human medical applications. The company has agreements with other corporate partners to pursue those developments. The PTO ruling overcomes a challenge brought by Infigen (DeForest, WI) concerning an overlapping patent, issued in mid-2001, for similar procedures to clone pigs from somatic cells. Early this year, ACT announced its involvement in another similar but as yet unresolved dispute with the Roslin Institute (Edinburgh, UK) and its licensee, Geron Corporation (Menlo Park, CA), over using proliferating, somatic cells to produce cloned cows, sheep, or pigs. JLF
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