Update on the ABL patents
We are all indebted to Professor Ted Shortliffe, President of the American Medical Informatics Association (www.amia.org) for diligently preparing a sworn Declaration to support the second round of petitions that Howrey LLP (formerly Day Casebeer) and I submitted to the USPTO two weeks ago. As a Stanford University MD/PhD student, Dr. Shortliffe created the seminal expert medical system - MYCIN in the 1970s. As a Stanford University faculty member, he founded the Section on Biomedical Informatics (SMI) at Stanford Medical School and led the biomedical informatics training program from 1984 to 2000.
Science has just rejected a letter written by many European HIV clinicians and researchers who were disappointed in the journal’s superficial coverage of the ABL patent dispute. The primary authors of the article — Maurizio Zazzi, Ricardo Camacho, and Jens Lundgren — have graciously provided me a copy of the European Response for posting on harmfulpatents.org
A detailed update on the status of the reexamination process and the second round of reexamination petitions can be found on the subsidiary page ABL Patents. As usual all of the documents can also be found on the Documents page.
Introduction to the new harmfulpatents.org
To the nearly 150 people who donated nearly $25,000 to harmfulpatents.org – thank you. You have helped me pay a significant proportion of my legal expenses and have inspired me. You are the leading edge of a movement that will reverse the trend in which biological knowledge and medical reasoning are considered property to be bought and sold but not shared. Your willingness to contribute funds sends the following message:
Those with biological and medical expertise must participate in the crucial decisions concerning ownership of biological and medical knowledge. These decisions should not be left to patent lawyers and overworked patent examiners, who have clear conflicts of interest.
In the past 12 months an MD/PhD student, a post-doctoral fellow in infectious diseases, a bio-engineering PhD graduate, and a professor of engineering contacted me to discuss their plans for developing low cost HIV virus load and drug resistance tests for low income countries. I listened to their scientifically sound plans and encouraged each of them. But inside I was dismayed because what I have learned during the past 15 months.
Tens of millions of dollars have been spent in legal fees in pursuit of royalties on undeserved obvious patents that assert ownership of the concepts of HIV drug resistance and virus load monitoring. The legal fees alone could have been used to pay for virus load and/or resistance testing for hundreds of thousands of patients. Moreover, the patent on the concept of the HIV drug resistance testing was the basis for the cross-licensing agreement between Stanford and ABL.
During the next few days, the harmfulpatents.org website will be re-engineered to focus on a small number of patents on conceptual approaches to medical diagnosis and therapy (“medical process patents”) such as the ABL patents and the aforementioned patents on the concepts of HIV drug resistance testing and virus load monitoring.
The site will focus on a small number of specific patents because colleagues, who are uncomfortable forming and expressing opinions about patents in general, do not hesitate to form and express opinions about specific patents. The site will focus on medical process patents because these patents are universally disparaged by medical organizations.