Understanding the Impact of IPR Estoppel and PTAB Discretionary Denials — Patents: Post-Grant Podcast
5 Key Takeaways | Making Sense of §102 Public Use and On Sale Bars to Patentability
Unexpected Paths to IP Law with Dan Young and Colin White
How IP Can Fuel Your Startup's Growth
Navigating PTAB’s New Approach to IPR and PGR Discretionary Denial - Patents: Post-Grant Podcast
5 Key Takeaways | AI and Your Patent Management, Strategy & Portfolio
What Were the Cooler Wars? (Part 2) — No Infringement Intended Podcast
A Guide to SEP: Standard Essential Patents for Tech Startups
Hilary Preston, Vice Chair at Vinson & Elkins, Discusses Energy Innovation: Protecting Your Intellectual Property Portfolio
What Were the Cooler Wars? (Part 1) — No Infringement Intended Podcast
5 Key Takeaways | Building a Winning Evidentiary Record at the PTAB (and Surviving Appeal)
(Podcast) The Briefing: 2025 IP Resolutions Start With a Review of IP Assets
The Briefing: 2025 IP Resolutions Start With a Review of IP Assets
Wolf Greenfield Attorneys Review 2024 and Look Ahead to 2025
(Podcast) The Briefing: A Very Patented Christmas – The Quirkiest Inventions for the Holiday Season
The Briefing: A Very Patented Christmas – The Quirkiest Inventions for the Holiday Season
A Conversation with Phil Hamzik
5 Key Takeaways | Alice at 10: A Section 101 Update
PODCAST: Williams Mullen's Trending Now: An IP Podcast - IP and M&A Transactions
4 Tips for Protecting Your AI Products
This Federal Circuit opinion analyzes lexicography in the context of claim construction. Alnylam Pharmaceuticals owns U.S. Patent Nos. 11,246,933 (parent) and 11,382,979 (child). These patents relate to biodegradable...more
In a recent decision, the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (“PTAB”) exercised its discretion under 35 U.S.C. § 314(a) to deny institution of an inter partes review (“IPR”) after applying the Fintiv factors, despite Petitioner’s...more
Effective July 8, 2025, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) expanded the availability of prioritized examination, increasing the limit on the number of requests from 15,000 to 20,000 in a fiscal year. The 20,000...more
Cell and gene therapies represent a transformative frontier in modern medicine, offering potential cures for previously untreatable conditions. However, securing intellectual property (IP) protection for these innovations...more
Under a new U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) policy issued in March 2025, pre-institution inter partes review (“IPR”) proceedings are now bifurcated, consisting of a first phase in which the director considers...more
Under a new U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ("USPTO") policy issued in March 2025, pre-institution inter partes review ("IPR") proceedings are now bifurcated, consisting of a first phase in which the director considers...more
Key Takeaways: - The Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) of the European Patent Office (EPO) issued its opinion in G1/24 on June 18, 2025 resolving divergent case law on how patent claims should be interpreted at the EPO. - The...more
The PTAB has published its monthly statistics wrap up for April 2025. As expected, those statistics show a significant decline in the institution rate compared to the first six months of the fiscal year. In those first six...more
Patent claims reciting compounds where at least one group of a compound genus is defined by its function are common. For example, familiar claim terms such as “chelating moiety,” “linker,” and “binding moiety” describe a...more
Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a springboard for breakthroughs in personalized medicine, enhanced medical imaging, and predictive modeling for drug development. And given the role it played in two recent...more
Key Takeaways: Federal Circuit Reopens CRISPR-Cas9 Priority Fight. The CAFC vacated the PTAB’s earlier ruling that UC lacked prior conception of CRISPR-Cas9 in eukaryotic cells, remanding the interference for reconsideration...more
This week, we take a closer look at two precedential cases concerning pharmaceutical patent protections as applied to drugs in development. In Incyte Corp. v. Sun Pharm., Judge Hughes entered a dissent pushing back on the...more
Insulin Glargine Challenged Claim Types in IPR and Litigation: Claims include those challenged in litigations and IPRs. Claims are counted in each litigation and IPR, so claims from the same patent challenged in multiple...more
At ACI’s 23rd Advanced Summit on Life Sciences Patents, you can expect informational overviews and thorough discussion of every facet of the industry. In a time of major legislative, regulatory, and judicial change, you can't...more
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing life science R&D (particularly in the realm of drug discovery) and challenging the traditional "human inventorship" requirement for U.S. patents. Recent guidance from the USPTO...more
In 1910, German scientist Paul Ehrlich introduced a groundbreaking concept to the world: chemical compounds could be engineered to interact with unique receptors on disease-causing cells while avoiding interaction with...more
Current written description jurisprudence can make it difficult to obtain broad antibody patents, leading practitioners to explore alternative claiming strategies in an effort to bypass the limited scope afforded under the...more
In 2024, not one but two Nobel Prizes (in Chemistry and Physics) were awarded to researchers for their work in artificial intelligence ("AI"). Particularly noteworthy for the life science community is the Nobel Prize in...more
In the mid-2000s, the U.S. Patent Office (USPTO) determined that reexaminations would be more consistent and legally correct if performed by a centralized set of experienced and specially trained Examiners. As a result, the...more
In In re: Xencor, Inc., the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit confirmed that the limiting preamble of a Jepson claim must be supported by the specification with “sufficient written description.” In its decision, the...more
Addressing the calculation of patent term extensions (PTEs) under the Hatch-Waxman Act, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a district court decision that under the act the issue date of the original...more
The Patent Term Extension (PTE) provisions of 35 U.S.C. § 156 compensate pharmaceutical patent owners for time they are not able to enjoy commercial market exclusivity because their products are not yet approved by the U.S....more
On March 13, 2025, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Federal Circuit) issued a decision titled In Re: Xencor, Inc. (the Xencor decision). The Xencor decision affirms the decision of the Appeals Review Panel...more
IN RE: XENCOR, INC. Before Hughes, Stark, and Schroeder (sitting by designation). Appeal from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Patent Trial and Appeal Board. To provide adequate written description for a Jepson claim,...more
In a precedential opinion issued on March 6, the Federal Circuit affirmed the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia that the claims in ImmunoGen’s US patent application 14/509,809 (“the ’809 application,”...more