Researchers Remain Co-Inventors on Nobel Winner’s Cancer Patents
Written July 17, 2020
A Nobel Prize winner’s fellow researchers must be named on his cancer immunotherapy patents, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held on July 14, 2020. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute v. Ono Pharm. Co., Fed. Cir., No. 19-2050, 7/14/20.
Japan-based Ono Pharmaceuticals Co., which owns the six patents, and patent licensee Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. appealed after a lower court ruled that the researchers—Gordon Freeman and Clive R. Wood—should be listed as co-inventors with famed Japanese physician-scientist and immunologist Tasuku Honjo.
Dana-Farber sued to have Freeman and Wood added to the patents as Honjo’s co-inventors. Ono appealed, arguing Freeman and Wood’s contributions were too far removed from the claimed subject matter of the patents. Freeman and Wood weren’t involved in the experiments that led directly to the conception of the claimed inventions, it said.
The Federal Circuit sided with Dana-Farber; asserting that joint inventors need not contribute to all aspects of the conception of an invention.