The University of Utah last week fired back at a bid by University of Massachusetts officials to have an RNAi technology intellectual property lawsuit dismissed, arguing that the court hearing the case — and not the US Supreme Court, as the officials contend — is the appropriate
According to the amended complaint, University of Utah's Brenda Bass had “so well-defined” the concept at issue that it "could have been reduced to practice by someone with ordinary skill in the art without further research.”
A team of American and Israeli researchers applied homozygosity mapping and disease network analyses to narrow in on a rare disease gene using exome sequence and microarray data from a single family.
Alnylam said that as part of the agreement, it would allow Merck, the parent company of one-time rival Sirna Therapeutics, to sub-license a portion of the disputed IP to which it previously did not have access.
As part of its request for dismissal, MIT admitted no wrongdoing, but agreed to be bound by any court ruling against the case's other defendants, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
The matter is of particular importance since UMass is the only one of the four organizations to which the IP is assigned to have licensed it to companies other than Alnylam.
Anthony Gregg, the outgoing president of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics, has resigned after using racially insensitive language.
In PNAS this week: adaptations among high-altitude Mycobacterium tuberculosis, response of multiple myeloma cells to chemotherapy-induced stress, and more.
