NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Troll Busters, an intellectual property services firm that specializes in challenging the validity or claims of certain patents, today announced that it has filed a brief with the US Patent and Trademark Office for reexamination of a patent covering multiplex PCR-based diagnostics.
The patent at issue, No. 5,582,989, is entitled “Multiplex genomic DNA amplification for deletion detection,” and covers a method for detecting multiple DNA sequences simultaneously. Multiplex, PCR-based genetic tests may fall under the broad-based claims of the patent.
Baylor College of Medicine is listed as the assignee of the patent, which was granted in December 1996. The patent is exclusively licensed to Abbott Laboratories.
The claims in the patent “are overly broad,” Jeff Oster, founder of Troll Busters, told GenomeWeb Daily News. “There is prior art, there’s new prior art that was not considered during the US application, and the US file history had a lot of flaws in it,” he added.
Oster said the USPTO generally takes around three months to decide whether or not it will reexamine the patent.
He said the reexamination brief should be available on the USPTO website next week.