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Biotech / Medical : Ligand (LGND) Breakout! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: scaram(o)uche who wrote (22083)	6/11/1998 11:52:00 AM
From: Henry Niman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32384

Rick, I can't give you a great deal of specifics on the agonist (and antagonist?) mimic patent applications, but I do have first hand knowledge of patent considerations in the past. When I was at Scripps a somewhat analogous situation arose. I had combined synthetic peptide and monoclonal antibodies technologies and the result was very unexpected (most thought that a very low percentage of monoclonal antibodies that recognized the peptide would also see the larger parent molecule). The first set of experiments were against flu peptides -creating the famous flu monoclonal that is now widely used in epitope additional technology, and the second set was against peptides of oncoproteins. The initial patent had claims as broad as monoclonals against virtually any oncoprotein peptide. However Progenx (now Ligand) patent attornies at Lyon & Lyon saw no theoretical reason for not expanding the claims to any (greater than 6 animo acids) synthetic peptide of ANY protein and the patent did issue with that broad claim. I really see no reason why the same logic could not be applied to Ligand's current situation with the mimics. They have shown that the conventional wisdom was in fact wrong and the technology used to identify the G-CSF mimic could be applied to ANY polypeptide hormone receptor. Thus, I would expect an extremely broad patent to issue (in several years).