Reactions to Amgen: Hard Work Ahead for Biotech Innovators and Attorneys Trying to Enable Genus Claims

Director Will Milliken was quoted in the article “Reactions to Amgen: Hard Work Ahead for Biotech Innovators and Attorneys Trying to Enable Genus Claims,” published by IPWatchdog. Will provided the following commentary on the Supreme Court affirming that the Federal Circuit was correct in finding that Amgen’s patents failed to meet the enablement requirement:

“The Court’s analysis in Amgen largely amounts to an endorsement of the Federal Circuit’s current approach to enablement law, so it doesn’t signal a sea change in the doctrine. But one striking thing about the Court’s reasoning is that it rests primarily on three very old cases involving very different types of technology—O’Reilly v. Morse, which concerned Samuel Morse’s telegraph patent; Incandescent Lamp, which concerned a patent on an electric lamp asserted against Thomas Edison; and Holland Furniture, which concerned a patent on starch glue. ‘While the technologies in these older cases may seem a world away from the antibody treatments of today,’ the Court reasoned, ‘the decisions are no less instructive for it.’ This suggests that, in the Court’s view, the same enablement analysis applies to all patents, no matter the technology—antibody patents are not special.”