Obviousness: Rarely Obvious

Pacific Biosciences has made new thrusts in theirongoing intellectual property action against Oxford Nanopore, adding two recently issued patents to the fray.  Oxford has publicly brushed these off as"another pore excuse for a lawsuit", but certainly the battle is not over.  One of these patents, 9,542,527"Compositions and methods for nucleic acid sequencing", appears to concern using hairpin linkages to read both strands, much likethe 9,404,146"Compositions and methods for nucleic acid sequencing"  patent that PacBio led with.  Since Oxfordhas announced they will abandon their"2D" methods that use such hairpins, this angle would seem to be soon irrelevant (as I predicted back when PacBio originally attacked).  But the other, US9,546,400"Nanopore sequencing using n-mers" covers basecalling methods, which is a new twist.  A route to challenge any patent is to identify"prior art", information which was publicly available at the time of the patent filing which impinges on the claims in the patent application.  Not only can exact matches to prior art be an issue, but also anything which would be"obvious" to a skilled practitioner.  And that can certainly be a can of wormsRead more »
Source: Omics! Omics! - Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Source Type: blogs