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Health Discovery Challenges Intel Patent on Method with Genetic Applications

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Health Discovery Corporation today announced it has filed a request for the reexamination of a patent held by Intel with applications for the identification of disease genes.

The request to the US Patent and Trademark Office challenges US Patent No. 7,685,077, which grants Intel the rights to the RFE-SVM method as described in the patent entitled, "Recursive Feature Eliminating Method Based on a Support Vector Machine."

According to the patent, issued to Intel in March 2010, RFE-SVM "is widely used in data intensive applications, such as disease genes selection, structured data mining, and unstructured data mining … [and] may be used to rank features, for example, to rank the genes that may cause a disease."

Health Discovery said in a statement today that USPTO failed "to properly consider relevant prior art during the original examination of Intel's patent application," including a 2002 publication which first described the RFE-SVM method. USPTO also failed to consider prior published patent applications from Health Discovery, as well as published articles by others that referenced the 2002 publication.

These all predate Intel's filing of its patent application, Health Discovery said.

Health Discovery has provided Intel written notice of its challenge. On deadline, Intel did not respond to a request for comment.

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