Kudos to Shanghai Hongene Biotech Corp. on its successful challenge of a competitor’s patent before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)! After extensive briefing and depositions by Procopio’s team, the trial board found in favor of Hongene. The PTAB judges ruled that all claims of a patent by ChemGenes Corp., No. 9,884,885, were unpatentable.

Washington, D.C.-based Life Sciences Intellectual Property Litigation Partner Jeremy Edwards presented the case at the oral hearing, and was supported in the litigation by Senior Counsel Brett Garrison and Partners Steve Maddox, Raymond Chan, Frank Yang, and Jack Shaw.

The dispute arose initially when ChemGenes sued Hongene, claiming that alleged sales of certain compounds used to make oligonucleotides (i.e., short strands of DNA and RNA) infringed ChemGenes’ patent. ChemGenes dropped that suit after our team pointed out various deficiencies with the case. Hongene then went on the offensive, challenging the validity of the patent at PTAB.

The Board’s ruling helps establish that our client’s work involves chemicals that can’t be patented, by ChemGenes or any other competitor.

Learn more in the PTAB decision.