There are certainly a large number of bad patents being issued,
particularly in the US. The patent office here seems to have decided
that it is easier (for them) to just approve most every application and
let the courts filter out the bad ones, which requires years of work for
lawyers and boatloads of money. There is a serious need for reform of
the process.
On the other hand, my experience with the technology transfer people
at the University of Oregon (when I used to work there) is that they,
(and most universities) are very careful to ensure the proposed patent's
utility and validity when making an application because the cost of
filing is quite high relative to their budget.
The patent application in the current discussion begins with a
detailed description of techniques that we all have used for many years
and are obvious to us. This description, however, is just the
introduction to the patent and not a listing of the methods being
patented. The first section just gives the context in which the methods
should be considered.
On page 7 there is the section "DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE
INVENTION" and that description is "A method for soaking ligands into
macromolecule (e.g. protein) crystals (e.g. microcrystals) on EM (e.g.
TEM) grids is presented. One or more crystals on the grid are soaked
simultaneously using standard cryo-EM vitrification equipment." So, the
only claim of novelty is for soaking in the ligand in a specific way
after the crystals are placed on the grid. I'm not qualified to say if
this is actually novel and unobvious, but the application seems to me to
be very narrow and specific and NOT a blanket claim of performing
structural biology using electron scattering.
Dale Tronrud
On 7/28/2023 12:45 AM, Winter, Graeme (DLSLtd,RAL,LSCI) wrote:
Interesting
https://www.freepatentsonline.com/20230228695.pdf
<https://www.freepatentsonline.com/20230228695.pdf>
Patent for use of electron diffraction to assess ligand binding
Stumbled across this because the patent application cites my work - felt
that this would be of interest to the community
… discuss?
Graeme
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