Recent Blog-Posts

An STN Patent Forum is being offered jointly by STN and PIUG on Monday, October 11, 2010, at the Hyatt Regency in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Topics include:

• What's New?
• The Secret Life of CAS REGISTRY
• Legal Status and Patent Profiles
• Approaches for Analysis of Patent Data on STN
• The Many Faces of INPAFAMDB on STN

The STN Patent Forum is free, but registration is required. For details and to register, visit:

http://www.cas.org/support/stngen/stntraining/piug2010northeast.html

The MPEP 8th Edition, 8th Revision 2 Volume Set will be ready to ship on or about September 22nd.

IP Data Corporation will honor our offer for low pre-order pricing of $65 for a single set down to as low as $50 per set in larger quantities until the books are in our warehouse (about Sept. 22nd). 

Call 800-832-2823 or visit http://www.IPDataCorp.com to reserve your MPEPssets at these prices.

The new 37-CFRs and the new TMEP are also in the warehouse and ready to ship right now.

IP Data Corporation
800-832-2823 http://www.IPDataCorp.com/

Message posted on behalf of the CEPIUG working group on Certification:

=====================================================

Dear all,

We have already quite a number of people who have indicated that in principle they are willing to sit one of the mock examinations for the Certification of Patent Information Specialists (we are very happy that most of them want to do both Paper A and Paper B).  However, for a proper evaluation of the exams, we need more people. The results plus the feedback from the participants will help to refine the format of the final examination papers.

The plan is to organize mock examination sessions before the end of 2010 in one or more locations. In order to prepare and organize these sessions, we already want to have an indication of the number of volunteers and where they come from. Therefore, our questions are:

• Who is willing to sit and do a mock examination?
• If so, do you want to do Chemistry or Engineering?
• Do you want to do both papers (paper A ‘searching’, paper B ‘selection/analysis’, in total 2 days), or only 1?⁽)*
• Is reimbursement of the travel and hotel expenses a prerequisite in order to be allowed to participate?

⁽)  {*}if only 1 day, preference for a paper can be indicated, but is not guaranteed since we need people for both papers

Please note when volunteering that you need to able to get/take time off from your work.

Since the dates and location(s) are not determined, yet, we realize that volunteers cannot make full commitments, but in this stage we want to make of list of those who seriously intend to participate.

Note: participation in the mock examinations will not result in certification, but it is a good learning experience for those who want to do the actual examination.

Looking forward to your responses,

With kind regards,
Bettina de Jong
Michele Fattori
All volunteers making the mock papers

Contact details:

Bettina de Jong
Head Patent Analysis
Shell International B.V.
The Hague, The Netherlands, Trade register no. 27155369
Correspondence: PO Box 384, 2501 CJ The Hague, The Netherlands
Visiting Address: Carel van Bylandtlaan 16, 2596 HR The Hague, The Netherlands
Tel: +31 (0)70 377 2981 Fax: 6141
Email: bettina.dejong@shell.com

Michele Fattori
Head of Documentation Services
Intellectual Property
LyondellBasell Industries
Basell Poliolefine Italia S.r.l.
P.le Donegani, 12 - 44100 Ferrara - Italy
Tel: +39 0532 46 7300
Fax: +39 0532 46 7675
Mailto:michele.fattori@lyondellbasell.com

Do you create reports combining data from different patent and/or drug pipeline databases?

If so, we'd like to request your participation in a BizInt survey on Rules for Selecting Data in Multi-Database Pipeline and Patents Reports.  Please help us by taking a brief survey about your "rules" -- how you choose data to represent related records in drug pipeline and/or patents reports.

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/346806/selecting-data-in-multi-database-reports

Based on feedback from our spring (patents only) survey, you can now provide comments for every question!

Your answers will help guide the development of BizInt Smart Charts Reference Row features.  The results of this survey will also be presented at our upcoming fall conferences, including the ICIC meeting in Vienna.

Please fill out the survey in the next two weeks, by Friday 10 September.

Thank you!
Diane Webb
President, BizInt Solutions

http://www.bizcharts.com/

Just a brief reminder to PIUG colleagues that the early bird registration deadline for the Thomson Reuters IP Solutions Customer Conference expires at the end of today, Tuesday 31^st August 2010.

The Thomson Reuters IP Solutions Customer Conference is being held at the Detroit Marriott Renaissance Center from October 17 – 20, 2010.  This conference is intended for patent research and analysis customers of the following products:

• Aureka
• Delphion
• DWPI (Derwent World Patents Index)
• PatentWeb
• Thomson Innovation
• Thomson Data Analyzer

 
The early bird registration price is $300; save $200 by registering before August 31.

STN offers several techniques and databases to help find antibody information. In this e-seminar, learn how to retrieve sequences of a specific region, such as the complimentary determining regions (CDRs), and to locate antibodies used as therapeutic or diagnostic agents. In particular, this session will focus on the key value-added features of REGISTRY, CAplus and GENESEQ
(DGENE) on STN. The importance of searching USGENE and PCTGEN will also be explored.

Date: September 2, 2010
09:00 am, Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4, New York)
02:00 pm, British Summer Time (GMT +1, London)
03:00 pm, Central European Summer Time (GMT +2, Berlin)

Date: September 14, 2010
11:00 am, Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -7, Los Angeles)
01:00 pm, Central Daylight Time (GMT -5, Chicago)
02:00 pm, Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4, New York)
07:00 pm, British Summer Time (GMT +1, London)
08:00 pm, Central European Summer Time (GMT +2, Berlin)

To register for these events, please visit http://www.stn-international.com/e-seminars.html

Columbus, Ohio (August 24, 2010) Today, leukemia patients who have struggled with cancer therapy resistance and intolerance will now have more options thanks to targeted drug therapy. Such new treatment options are due, in part, to a rapid increase in journal and patent publications following the discovery of Gleevec, as reported by Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), the world's authority for chemical information.

Since President Clinton announced that the draft sequence of the human genome was completed in 2000, research about specific types of cancers grew exponentially. Fifty years of cancer and Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML) drug treatments are examined in the CAS Chemistry Research Report: Human Genome Discoveries Spur Growth of Cancer Treatments. CAS researchers confirmed that Gleevec succeeded as a first-generation drug that targeted CML, as originally reported by Novartis and Oregon Health and Science researchers. Second- and third-generation CML-targeted drugs benefited from Gleevec's patent success and continued to propel the growth of CML research and patent publications.

Other important findings from the CAS report include:

• During the last 20 years, cancer therapy journal publications grew 179 percent, while patent publications grew 318 percent.
• From 1990 to 2009, journal article publications about CML treatment expanded 196 percent. At the same time, patent publications exploded with 700 percent growth.
• The World Intellectual Patent Organization (WIPO) is the leading patent authority for Gleevec use in CML.
• U.S. researchers authored three times as many journal publications for Gleevec as any other country.
• In 2009, second-generation drugs Tasigna and Sprycel displaced Gleevec as single medications for CML, with a combined 41-fold increase in journal publications and a concomitant increase in patent publications compared to Gleevec.

"The results of the analysis outlined in the CAS Chemistry Research Report further validate that we are on the right course. The accelerated growth in CML-related publications following Gleevec provides yet more evidence that the targeting approach opened up new paths of exploration for the medical and scientific communities. Based on this success we are now optimistic that all cancers could be controlled with drugs like Gleevec," Dr. Brian Druker, Director, Oregon Health & Science University Knight Cancer Institute

CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, is the world's authority for chemical information. Our databases are curated and quality-controlled by CAS scientists, and recognized by chemical and pharmaceutical companies, universities, government organizations, and patent offices around the world as comprehensive and authorative. By combining these databases with advanced search and analysis technologies (SciFinder, STN, and Science IP products and services), CAS delivers the most current, complete, and cross-linked secure digital information environment for scientific discovery. To learn more, visit www.cas.org.

I have pleasure in attaching our brief report on the Annual Members Conference 2010 of the Patent Documentation Group (PDG).

I hope all is well with you and wish you a pleasant weekend.

Kind regards,

Sandy
–
Dr. Alexander (aka Sandy) Mullen
Secretary General
PDG - Patent Documentation Group
Flehenberg 72
42489 Wuelfrath
Germany
Tel +49-(0)2058-72-837
Fax +49-(0)2058-72-701
www.p-d-g.org
alexander.mullen@p-d-g.info

My colleague recently started publishing a free alert containing all the new patent litigations in the U.S. each day, including free complaint PDFs.

It was featured on Patently-O last week:http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/08/patent-litigation-alerts.html

It's still in "beta" but he gave me a set of 20 invites to pass along to the PIUG community: http://news.priorsmart.com/patent-complaints/web-invites/piug-HASBH-20

I have found the service to be very useful and more timely that other sources.

Best regards,

Matt Rappaport

The Patent Information Meetings, Conferences, and Seminars page has been recently updated.

I. Program highlights related to patent information have been added to the following forthcoming events:

August 2010: Fall ACS Meeting in Boston, MA.

September 2010: EAP2IC in Singapore, PIAC China 2010 in Beijing, China; Markush Forum/ChemAxon in Boston, MA; Global Patent Congress 2010 in Copenhagen, Denmark, Pharma CI Conference in Parsippany, NJ, 2nd WIPO Global Symposium of IP Authorities* in Geneva

October 2010: AIPPI 42nd World Intellectual Property Congress; Thomson Reuters IP Solutions Customer Conference; Information Workshop on European Bioinformatics Resources (EMBL-EBI & EPO)*, in Munich, Germany, EPO Patent Information Conference 2010* in Lausanne, Switzerland; 2010 AIPLA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC; Examination Matters 2010 in The Hague; 2010 ICIC* in Vienna, Austria; PaIR'10 (3rd International CIKM Workshop on Patent Information Retrieval) in Toronto; PATINEX 2010 in Seoul, Korea, Text Mining Symposium 2010
in Bonn, Germany

November 2010: Pharma-Bio-Med™ 2010 and Patent Statistics for Decision Makers 2010*, both in Vienna, AT.

Dates for several 2011 events has been added, including IRFC/IRFS 2011* in Vienna, AT in June and a new event: Online Information Asia-Pacific in Hong Kong in March 2011

II. Information for January-July 2010 has been moved to a new page, Previous Patent Information Meetings, Conferences, and Seminars 2010 and links to selected presentations or program highlights have been added to the following events:

July 2010: 33rd Annual ACM SIGIR Conference (with a link to a Leif Azzopardi paper "Search System Requirements of Patent Analysts" based on 2009 PIUG survey); 103rd AALL Annual Meeting (American Association of Law Libraries)*.

June 2010: IRF Symposium*, Vienna, AT (copy of presentations & videos): sessions on chemical patents, image retrieval, Cross-lingual patent retrieval and translation, Interfacing: Breaking the cycle of command line use? and Evaluation methodologies (PIUG Members on the program: Stephen Adams, Nicko Goncharoff, Jane List, Joni Sayeler, Anthony Trippe plus Cynthia Yang in Q&A); The 8th NTCIR Workshop*, Tokio; 2010 PATINFO Meeting in Ilmenau, Germany - program highlights only.

May 2010 IRF Scientific Conference*, Vienna, AT: (presentations & videos); [IRF] Strategic Seminar (abstracts only); PATLIB2010* in Dresden, Germany with a session on European Patent & IP practice.

April 2010: Search Matters 2010*, the Hague (e-learning modules); P&HT Spring Meeting 2010*, Philadelphia; Computers in Libraries 2010 - program highlights.

March 2010: Spring 2010 ACS Meeting (abstracts only).

February 2010: 2010 NFAIS Annual Conference (National Federation of Advanced Information Services) - program highlights.

Note: Key events are bolded; conferences which provide copies of presentations marked with an asterisk (*).

Markush Forum
September 16th, 9.00 – 12:30.

ChemAxon is pleased to announce the initial US meeting of the Markush Forum on Thursday morning 16th of September.

The Markush Forum provides an opportunity for interested organizations to participate in the further development of ChemAxon’s tools for Markush structure enumeration and search.

ChemAxon has recently added support for importing the Markush DARC format (VMN), which is used in Thomson Reuters’ Derwent World Patent Index database (DWPI – part of the MMS). Currently we are working on business models with Thomson Reuters to provide customers the right tools and data to perform patent Markush related tasks.

Key areas to be covered at the Forum include:

•Use of Markush tools by non-specialist scientists
•Availability of DWPI from Thomson Reuters for in-house use
•Competitive intelligence and white space analysis of selected patents
•Refining / visualization of results of online chemical patent searches
•Creation and analysis of Markush structures for use in combinatorial chemistry or patent filings

Who should attend?

Information Managers, Patent information Specialists, Research Managers concerned with investigation of patent space, Patent Attorneys, Business Intelligence Analysts.

Resources

•Markush Search Add-on product page
•Markush enumeration Calculator Plugin product page
•Markush scientific & technical presentations page
•Markush Search implementation – select Table=”markush”
Source: ChemAxon web-page

Test of enablement - “Any analysis of whether a particular claim is supported by the disclosure in an application requires a determination of whether that disclosure, when filed, contained sufficient information regarding the subject matter of the claims as to enable one skilled in the pertinent art to make and use the claimed invention.”  Source
I have always considered the CAFC judgments as one of the best repository to learn intellectual property. I happened to come across a very interesting case.
Janssen Enablement Alzheimers (pdf) - This case (relating to US Patent No. 4,663,318) goes to prove the necessity of writing very detailed specifications backed with strong experimental data for claims to be upheld in the court of law. In this case, Janssen claimed use of a certain drug ‘galanthamine’ for treating Alzheimers. At the time of submitting the patent for review, the inventor who later on licensed the granted patent to Jansen, did not have sufficient experimental data proving direct probable linkage to use of galanthamine for Alzheimers treatment. USPTO examiner also cited this point, yet issued the patent (this part is weird). Eventually, the claims of this patent were held invalid due to an ‘enablement’ clause - in simple terms, enablement here means the specification did not directly support the claims of the inventor.
The discussions were also adverting to the utility requirement which prevents mere ideas from being patented. As noted in Genentech, Inc. v. Novo Nordisk A/S, 108 F.3d 1361, 1366 (Fed. Cir. 1997), “[p]atent protection is granted in return for an enabling disclosure of an invention, not for vague intimations of general ideas that may or may not be workable.

To read more, please click here

Toyota and Paice have just announced a settlement on their long standing dispute over the alleged infringement of Paice's hybrid car patents. While the terms of this settlement are not known, Paice appear to be satisfied with the terms of the settlement, noting on their website “I am happy that Toyota and Paice came to an amicable resolution on the use of my power-assisted engine invention” . This settlement follows a 2007 judgement that Toyota infringed Paice's US patent 5,343,970 under the doctrine of equivalents. 

Australian IP legal firm Griffith Hack has been following this litigation with close interest after it completed a general patent landscaping search in the area of hybrid cars (referred to on Paice's website). As part of this study, Griffith Hack partnered with data analytics firm Optimice to test and further develop an innovative patent analysis technique. This technique, known as Network Patent Analytics (NPA), uses patent citation density to predict the relative quality of patents and inventions. By doing so, NPA can combine and focus on what can be hundreds of thousands of citation opinions to reveal the leading and dominant patents, and also show the similarity between patents. While other techniques are available to show similarity between patents, these tend to based on similarity of keywords. In contrast, NPA does not compare patents on the similarity of keywords, but instead on a distillation of vast numbers of citation relationships. 

The application of NPA to the hybrid car study included the ranking of 60,000 hybrid car patents. Surprisingly, this ranking showed that patents filed or controlled by the relatively unknown Paice LLC ranked in positions 1, 2, 4 and 7, ahead of patents filed by more well known hybrid car companies such as Toyota. Further research showed that the number 2 ranked Paice patent was the US patent 5,343,970 that Toyota was held to infringe. Griffith Hack has since tested a number of other patent ranking systems, and not yet found another patent ranking system which was able to rank the Paice hybrid car patents as highly as NPA. 

A more recent development of this analysis technique has suggested why Toyota has been held to infringe the #2 ranked Paice patent and not the #1, or any other Paice patent. A review of citation directions suggested that the fourth and fifth highest ranked Toyota patents, US 5,841,201 and US 5,839,533, appeared to be closely related to and post-dated the Paice patent. While it is a truism that products and not other patents infringe patents, the presence of a highly rated patent disclosing a similar invention from a competitor may suggest that the potential for infringement is then worth investigating. In particular, NPA may objectively suggest which technologies may be in use by targeted competitors and that might (subject to the usual careful patent attorney or lawyer confirmation) potentially infringe the patents being reviewed. 

Griffith Hack is now further investigating this ability to predict potential infringements. As part of this, Griffith Hack would like to partner with one or two organisations who are interested in objectively detecting potential infringements of their patent portfolios using what may be a world leading method. If you are interested in partnering with Griffith Hack in this area, please contact me.

On July 12, 2010, CAS enhanced its extensive patent coverage by adding patent and patent family information from the Costa Rica Registry of Industrial Property. Also at this time, CAS expanded coverage of the Argentina National Institute of Industrial Property. For details, see the latest STNews Database News.

Dear Colleague,

Just a reminder that the early booking price for the 2010 ICIC meeting in Vienna this October expires 10 AUGUST 2010.

If you are planning to attend the meeting but have not yet sent in your booking, please do so soon and save yourself some money. Full conference details are at:

http://www.haxel.com/icic/2010/meeting

I look forward to seeing you in Vienna.

Regards,

Christoph Haxel

www.haxel.com