Hot Stocks story about GERN
Geron Corporation announced that the Enlarged Board of Appeals of the European Patent Office has issued a decision in case G0002/06, which was an appeal by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation against the rejection of claims in WARF's European Patent Application No. 96903521.1. The claims of the application pertain to the first isolation of human embryonic stem cells by Dr. James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin. The decision upholds the rejection of WARF's claims as being impermissible under a rule of the European Patent Convention that prohibits the patenting of inventions which concern "the uses of human embryos for industrial or commercial purposes." In reaching its decision, the Enlarged Board of Appeals emphasized the fact that at the time that the priority patent application was filed, the only method of obtaining hESCs, as described in the application, required the use of a human embryo. In contrast, following Thomson’s discovery, many hESC lines became widely available through stem cell banks, obviating the need for researchers to culture the cells from embryonic material. Therefore, this decision should not affect patent applications for later-developed hESC technologies, including technologies developed by Geron to enable scalable manufacture of hESCs for therapeutic and drug discovery applications, and their differentiation into a range of functional cell types, such a pancreatic islet cells and cardiomyocytes |
