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I’ve been generally unsympathetic to laments that biotech and medical-device companies will suffer if U.S. patent law is reformed, and that has a lot to do with some of the grotesque but legal patent abuses biopharma companies have perpetrated over the years in order to lock out competition for as long as possible. While Big Pharma has almost certainly been the biggest offender along these lines, Big Biotech has plenty to answer for as well.

Which is why the news that Genentech’s “Cabilly” patent, which lays claim to some fundamental techniques for making bioengineered antibodies, has just been rejected for a fourth time — although it’s still not dead — strikes me as a perfect occasion for Schadenfreude. Cabilly, which continues to bring Genentech more than $100 million in royalties every year well after it should have expired, offers a terrific illustration of the the lengths companies will go to artificially extend patent terms. These zombie patents cost the healthcare system — which, of course, ultimately pays the price in inflated product costs — billions of dollars, all the while stifling innovation and enriching those who have figured out how best to game the system.

The history of Cabilly is long and convoluted — anyone interested should take a look at this Legal Times piece (PDF link), tellingly titled “It Lives for 29 Years?” — so I’ll limit myself to the high points. In 1989, Genentech found its newly issued Cabilly patent in conflict with another, issued the very same day, owned by Celltech, a U.K. biotech that also claimed ownership of basic antibody technology. The companies clashed for years, first in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, then in the courts, before finally agreeing to settle the case.

Their 2001 agreement remains confidential, but the aftermath was clear. The court ruled in Genentech’s favor, voided the Celltech patent and, remarkably, issued Genentech a brand-new patent — “Cabilly II” — that covered exactly the same invention as Cabilly I. Genentech also agreed to pay Celltech the same royalties it would have received from its now-worthless patent until the date it would have expired in 2006. In other words, Celltech got paid as if it had won the case, while valuable antibody technology that would have entered the public domain two years ago remains locked up by Genentech’s new patent for another decade — until 2018, in fact. It’s a win-win for the two companies and their shareholders, but a major loss for everyone else.

The Cabilly patent, which earned Genentech $133 million last year, has come under sharp attack over the past several years. In 2005, MedImmune — now a unit of AstraZeneca — sued to invalidate Cabilly II on the grounds that it resulted from an illegal, anti-competitive agreement between Genentech and Celltech. That MedImmune case won’t actually be tried until June, as it was tied up for years in a procedural argument that went all the way to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, however, the patent office has also reexamined the patent and found it wanting on several occasions — most recently just two days ago.

Like the zombie it is, however, Cabilly keeps springing back to life every time someone thinks it might finally be down. Genentech has the right to appeal the latest decision within the patent office and in the courts, and of course it has every incentive to run out the clock as long as it can. Unless, that is, MedImmune can put a bullet in Cabilly’s head first.

(Photo by Flickr user Scott Beale/Laughing Squid, used under Creative Commons license.)

[NOTE: This article inaugurates our “Perspective” feature, in which entrepreneurs, investors, and other experts discuss developments or pressing issues within the life sciences -- a parallel effort to the "Contributors" section on the main VentureBeat page. We ultimately hope to distinguish perspective pieces from our regular coverage with a distinctive font and other visual elements, but for now, they'll just be labeled clearly and will carry a note much like this one. --D.P.H.]

By SERGIO GARCIA and MICHAEL DAVIS-WILSON

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court shook the foundations of patent licensing and technology transfer, altering the balance of power between patent holders and their licensees and creating profound implications for the life-sciences industry. In MedImmune v. Genentech, the high court effectively paved the way for more frequent patent challenges that could disadvantage smaller companies and organizations.

For decades prior to the MedImmune decision, courts typically refused to allow a company that licensed a patent to challenge its validity unless that company had violated the license and faced an imminent lawsuit for infringing the patent. In MedImmune, however, the Supreme Court ruled that licensees shouldn’t have to risk the harsh consequences of an infringement suit in order to ask a court to invalidate a patent. (Read the court’s Jan. 9 decision in PDF form here.)

Now companies that license intellectual property are much freer to challenge patents, a development that has already begun to alter the playing field for patent holders and licensees alike. That’s particularly true in industries such as biotechnology, where widely licensed patents that cover drug-production technologies are commonplace. Early indications based on lower court decisions also suggest that MedImmune may have made it easier to challenge patents in a broad variety of circumstances, not simply those in which a company wishes to avoid paying royalties by invalidating a licensed patent.

The post-MedImmune environment presents an acute challenge for small biotech companies and universities. These organizations generally have limited funds to fight patent lawsuits and might therefore face stepped-up legal attacks on their patents. Some licensing strategies, however, can help minimize those risks, although none are quick fixes, and their effectiveness will vary depending on the relative bargaining power of the parties involved.

IP holders, for instance, may seek to make patent lawsuits more expensive for licensees by requiring higher royalties, or even termination of the license, in the event of a challenge. In the latter case, of course, a challenge could once again expose the plaintiff to an infringement lawsuit, effectively restoring the pre-MedImmune status quo.

Patent holders might also seek to reduce the economic incentive to challenge a patent by “front-loading” payments — for instance, by requiring a lump-sum payment at the time of signing in lieu of a high royalty rate on potential future sales of products covered by the license. Finally, licensing companies may erect new roadblocks, such as making mandatory arbitration of any patent challenge a requirement of the initial license agreement.

Of course, many patent holders, especially emerging companies with limited resources, may not have the bargaining clout to insist on such terms. What’s more, these strategies will only work for future licenses — current licenses will remain vulnerable to challenge under MedImmune unless they are renegotiated.

In many respects, MedImmune has substantially boosted the risks faced by patent holders while creating new leverage for licensees. In this sense, it parallels other recent court rulings and new patent-office rules that also threaten to erode patent protection. While well entrenched patent holders may be able to limit those risks by altering the terms of future licenses, there remains a strong possibility that the new legal environment could limit the ability of smaller companies and universities to make full use of their intellectual property, potentially even jeopardizing the pace of biomedical innovation.

Sergio Garcia is a partner in the Intellectual Property Group and the Corporate Group at the law firm Fenwick & West. Michael Davis-Wilson, a Fenwick & West summer associate, contributed to the preparation of this article. Disclosure: Fenwick & West is a sponsor of VentureBeat.

It’s been clear for some time that bad blood has been building between Oregon Health and Science University researcher Brian Druker (pictured at left), who first showed that the cancer drug Gleevec could produce near-miraculous remissions in certain leukemia patients, and the drugmaker Novartis, which owns Gleevec. When asked, Druker has long acknowledged that he had to cajole dubious officials at Novartis — then Ciba-Geigy — into keeping Gleevec alive, in part because those officials thought that chronic myelogenous leukemia was too small a market to be worth bothering with.

Now, though, Druker’s simmering frustration with his one-time partner seems to have boiled over into something approaching open animosity, at least when calibrated for the academic context from which it originates. In an opinion piece published at LiveMint.com — apparently a joint venture of the Hindustan Times and the WSJ, although that’s not stated explicitly anywhere on the site — Druker lambastes Novartis for setting high prices for Gleevec (known as Glivec in non-U.S. markets) and for abusing its patent rights. This comes just a week after an Indian court rejected a Novartis patent application on a certain form of the Gleevec molecule (see Pharmalot and the WSJ health blog for more).

It’s worth a look at the whole piece, but I was particularly struck by Druker’s sly dig at Novartis drug researchers and their bosses (emphasis added):

Many scientists, if not most of those I have collaborated with in these settings, are engaged in research primarily motivated by the pursuit of knowledge as a means to help patients. For many of these scientists it is, therefore, of great concern that the results of their efforts can’t reach patients and save lives because of pricing strategies and patent policies such as “patent evergreening” (minor changes to existing molecules designed to extend patent monopolies) used by partners further down the drug development process.

Given my unfamiliarity with LiveMint.com, I’ve pinged both Druker and the OHSU news office to confirm the authenticity of this essay. I’ll update if and when I hear back. (Hat tip: Pharmalot.)

Yesterday, the Supreme Court handed down a patent decision (PDF) that makes it easier to deny or challenge a patent that seems “obvious” to a patent examiner or a court. This decision has already been hailed by the technology industry, which has lobbied hard for legal changes that would limit inventors’ rights somewhat in order to discourage “patent trolls.”

The biotech and pharma industries, by contrast, could find themselves in more of a pickle. Reinterpretation of the “obviousness” standard — in which the Supremes rejected a “narrow, rigid” definition adopted years ago by a lower court — may make it far more difficult to patent new generations of existing drugs, particularly if the newer products amount to little more than “extended release” forms that allows people to take pills or shots less frequently. For instance, last year the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected a patent for an extended-release form of an Alza incontinence drug as obvious — and that was under the old, now-rejected, standard for “obviousness.”

Ultimately, though, it’s not clear to me that this decision presents a huge problem for biotech. (Pharma, which leans a lot more heavily on the extended-release dodge in order to effectively extend patent lifetimes, is another question entirely.) With only a few exceptions — the Amgen drugs Aranesp and Neulasta, for instance, or various forms of quick-acting or long-lasting insulin — biotech has relatively few “next generation” products, and in general has lot more leeway to produce “innovative” follow-on products that do much more than simply stick around longer in the bloodstream. (Such as, for instance, by boosting the affinity of an antibody so that it sticks to its target much more tightly, or altering its structure so that it is less likely to trigger an unwanted immune reaction.)

On the other hand, yesterday’s case is this third in recent months to limit the rights of patent holders. In those previous cases, the Supreme Court made it more difficult to obtain an injunction against an alleged infringer and easier to challenge a patent without first violating it. Taken together, the three cases could produce some unexpected fireworks in the industry, albeit ones that are likely to go off in slow motion in coming months and years.

For more comment, check out Aaron Barkhoff’s thoughts on his Orange Book blog, those of Dennis Crouch at Patently O, and comments from various patent-law attorneys in this Legal Times piece.

I’m at work on a longer post that hasn’t yet come together, so I thought I’d pull an old dodge favored by daily newspaper columnists and respond to some reader comments instead. Fortunately for me, both comments left here in the past day or so have been thought-provoking — maybe there’s hope for the Internet after all.

With respect to the tussle over patents and drug pricing in Thailand, Gal Josefsberg wrote:

I’m not sure how they expect to get cheap HIV drugs if the destroy the company’s profits. I know we all think these sort of drugs should be cheap, but there’s an enormous cost to developing and testing them. Without some kind of profit motive, the R&D spent on these treatments will go down. I’m not saying the pharma companies should gouge HIV patients, but just saying “thanks for developing this drug, we’ll take it from here” is not the right answer.

Where AIDS drugs in the developing world are concerned, the arguments tend to be a little more complicated than I may have suggested. Some pharma and biotech companies — I’m most familiar with Gilead Sciences, although I believe others do this as well — explicitly acknowledge that it’s wrong to profit from the world’s poorest nations and set what they call “no-profit” prices for HIV drugs in almost 100 countries. Of course, they still plan to make out handsomely in the U.S., Europe and other industrialized parts of the world.

Things, however, get quite a bit murkier in “middle income” nations like Thailand, where the population as a whole is unquestionably getting richer, but where many of the people who need the drugs most are also still quite poor. Critics argue that it’s the responsibility of the Thai government to help its citizens afford drugs, and while they have a point, I’m not convinced the drug companies are wholly blameless. Many of them have only grudgingly begun efforts to cut poorer nations some slack on the price of life-saving drugs, following years of protest by AIDS activists and international organizations. Given that many activists still think companies like Abbott are trying to profiteer in developing-but-not-exactly-wealthy nations like Thailand, it’s no wonder that distrust of the pharmas still runs high in many quarters.

By the way, Brazil has apparently issued a similar threat to Merck over its HIV drug efavirenz (via Pharmalot).

In response to an item on the tactics drug reps use to push their product on doctors, RJ notes:

the first paper seems to be describing a phenomenon known as “sales”– truly a beauty to behold when it’s done well. No matter whether you’re selling drugs or enterprise software. That’s why the great sales people are paid so much. They’re artists.

That paper was written so vividly that I couldn’t help but wonder if Ahari, the former Lilly rep, doesn’t kind of miss his old job for exactly those reasons. There’s definitely something awe-inspiring about watching a professional salesperson at work, although I’d feel better about admiring it here if the sales job wasn’t specifically designed to override a physician’s best medical judgment — which is, after all, what the patient needs most and what insurers are supposed to be paying for.

Arm wrestling over drug patents – Three months ago, the military government running Thailand informed Abbott Laboratories that it intended to break the company’s patents on several expensive drugs, including the HIV protease inhibitor Kaletra, thus allowing the manufacture or import of cheaper knockoffs. Abbott responded by dropping its plans to bring newer drugs, including a heat-resistant version of Kaletra, to Thailand, and the pharma and the junta have been locked in a standoff ever since. Over the weekend, Abbott offered to make the new version of Kaletra available at a deep discount price if Thailand left its patents alone; so far the government hasn’t responded.

The issue is a serious one for drug companies, including the handful of biotechs — among them, Gilead Sciences and Vertex Pharmaceuticals — who make or hope to launch drugs against developing-world scourges such as HIV and hepatitis. Years of high-handed behavior on the part of Big Pharma have fueled a militant backlash in poorer nations against the makers of high-priced, life-saving drugs. The Wall Street Journal has an in-depth look at the issue today. Here’s an excerpt:

Global drug makers are increasingly looking to emerging markets to compensate for slowing growth in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Abbott’s troubles in Thailand suggest that cracking the new markets can be tough because governments are driving a hard bargain on price. They are using the threat of breaking patents to get good deals. Thailand has won the support of nonprofit groups and world organizations while meeting little resistance from the U.S. government….

A number of emerging nations are working on plans to slash drug costs. Lawmakers in the Philippines are debating legislation that would permit breaking patents in certain circumstances and allow the country to use more generic drugs to fight AIDS and potential pandemics. Kenya is considering breaking patents as Dr. Mongkol has done to open the door to cheaper copies.

In an interview last week, Indonesia’s U.S.-educated trade minister, Mari Elka Pangestu, said her country might introduce price caps to bring the price of branded drugs closer to the level of generic equivalents. “The difference in price between nongenerics and generics is perceived to be too high,” Ms. Pangestu said.

Such moves could threaten the ambitions of drug companies in developing nations — especially those such as Thailand that are growing wealthier. While the U.S., Europe and Japan account for the vast majority of sales at big Western drug makers, their growth is slowing. The U.S. this year will contribute about 36% of total growth in pharmaceutical sales, down from 54% five years ago, according to a forecast by IMS Health, a research and consulting firm.

Heart problems in the elementary-school set – Another WSJ story chronicles a previously overlooked angle to the obesity debate: Kids as young as ten are turning up with early signs of heart disease. The finding emerged by accident when researchers enrolled 50 seemingly healthy kids in a clinical trial, only to find via echocardiogram that several had enlarged hearts — a condition known as left ventricular hypertrophy. LVH is typically associated with a high body mass index, but doctors apparently hadn’t even noticed that these kids were overweight, quite possibly because they see so many heavy children that their mental picture of “average” was skewed.

Fear and loathing among biomedical researchers – Earlier this decade, a sustained push to boost biomedical research doubled the NIH budget in five years. Now, however, the unintended consequences of that rapid increase are coming home to roost. This news story in Science lays out the basic problem: Big budgets attracted more scientists and led universities to build bigger and larger labs, but now that demand for research money is higher, budgets are flat, leaving less to go around. For a personal take on the situation, check out this post from “Orac,” a pseudonymous surgeon/scientist at Respectful Insolence.

Google your health records? – Biotech/pharma consultant David Williams, blogging from the World Health Care Conference in Washington, reports on a speech by Google’s Adam Bosworth and thinks a Google healthcare initiative might not be that far off. (A quick glossary for anyone clicking through to Williams’ acronym-heavy post: EHR stands for “electronic health record,” while PHR means “personal health record” — the distinction, apparently, being that an EHR is maintained by a health-care provider, while a PHR is owned and updated by the patient. If you want to know more, try this explanation. PBM, meanwhile, stands for “pharmacy benefit manager” — it’s essentially a catch-all phrase for pharmacy chains and other companies that manage the business of buying drugs and filling prescriptions. Aren’t you sorry you asked?)

EHR SNAFU – Yet another WSJ story today outlines the technical problems Kaiser Permanente has experienced as it tried to roll out an electronic-records system — while, of course, squelching a whistleblower who sought to draw attention to the issue. Merrill Goozner, who’s also at the World Health Care Forum, has more on the subject of electronic records and how they might — and might not — encourage competition among doctors here and here.

AstraZeneca chief acknowledges drug-promotion issue – According to this article in The Independent, AstraZeneca CEO David Brennan has acknowledged the possibility that his sales reps may have been improperly promoting the company’s chemotherapy drug Arimidex, and suggests that the issue is under internal investigation. (Hat tip: Peter Rost.)

A long-awaited struggle over patent reform appears to be upon us, the Washington Post reports today (hat tip to the WSJ’s Health Blog). It pits the tech industry against pharmaceutical/biotech companies over intellectual property protections that, depending on where you stand, are either largely a nuisance or an industry’s lifeblood.

Both the House and Senate are expected to introduce bills today that reflect the tech industry’s long-standing desire to weaken the protection patents offer their holders — over, of course, the vehement objections of pharma/biotech. The main issue separating the two pillars of U.S. high technology: Big tech companies tend to end up as defendants in patent-infringement suits, while big drug companies are more frequently plaintiffs. (The Washington Post’s Alan Sipress didn’t put it that simply, but that’s essentially what’s going on).

Generally speaking, tech companies want a greater ability to challenge the validity of existing patents and relief from what they consider exorbitant damages, such the $1.52 billion Microsoft was ordered to pay Alcatel-Lucent in February for infringing two patents on MP3 digital-music technology. Companies that pop up with such patent claims when a technology is already in widespread use are frequently derided as “patent trolls,” and the tech industry is anxious to limit their ability to block product development or to demand huge damages after the fact.

The pharmaceutical and biotech industries, by contrast, frequently spend years — and sometimes decades — developing drugs that are often protected by a limited number of patents. As a result, drugmakers are far more interested in protecting their investment by using those patents to ward off would-be competitors.

The possibility of patent changes is clearly a big deal for both sides, although I suspect that warding off changes is going to be an uphill battle for the drugmakers, who could even end up longing for a presidential veto. Not only has the drug industry leaned heavily Republican in recent years — hardly an auspicious sign now that Congress is held by Democrats — but criticism that overly strong patents stifle innovation has been growing steadily in recent years, and has even seemed to pique the interest of the Supreme Court. Plus, if things do get down and dirty on Capitol Hill, it probably won’t take long for stories about drug companies’ own abuses of the patent system to begin circulating again, potentially tipping the scales further toward reform.

(Note: This item has been copied over to the Life Sciences page from its original location on the VentureBeat main page. To view it in its original context, with comments, click here.)

A long-awaited struggle over patent reform appears to be upon us, the Washington Post reports today (hat tip to the WSJ’s Health Blog). It pits the tech industry against pharmaceutical/biotech companies over intellectual property protections that, depending on where you stand, are either largely a nuisance or an industry’s lifeblood.

Both the House and Senate are expected to introduce bills today that reflect the tech industry’s long-standing desire to weaken the protection patents offer their holders — over, of course, the vehement objections of pharma/biotech. The main issue separating the two pillars of U.S. high technology: Big tech companies tend to end up as defendants in patent-infringement suits, while big drug companies are more frequently plaintiffs. (The Washington Post’s Alan Sipress didn’t put it that simply, but that’s essentially what’s going on).

Generally speaking, tech companies want a greater ability to challenge the validity of existing patents and relief from what they consider exorbitant damages, such the $1.52 billion Microsoft was ordered to pay Alcatel-Lucent in February for infringing two patents on MP3 digital-music technology. Companies that pop up with such patent claims when a technology is already in widespread use are frequently derided as “patent trolls,” and the tech industry is anxious to limit their ability to block product development or to demand huge damages after the fact.

The pharmaceutical and biotech industries, by contrast, frequently spend years — and sometimes decades — developing drugs that are often protected by a limited number of patents. As a result, drugmakers are far more interested in protecting their investment by using those patents to ward off would-be competitors.

The possibility of patent changes is clearly a big deal for both sides, although I suspect that warding off changes is going to be an uphill battle for the drugmakers, who could even end up longing for a presidential veto. Not only has the drug industry leaned heavily Republican in recent years — hardly an auspicious sign now that Congress is held by Democrats — but criticism that overly strong patents stifle innovation has been growing steadily in recent years, and has even seemed to pique the interest of the Supreme Court. Plus, if things do get down and dirty on Capitol Hill, it probably won’t take long for stories about drug companies’ own abuses of the patent system to begin circulating again, potentially tipping the scales further toward reform.

The U.S. patent office has invalidated some key stem-cell patents, a significant move that could shake up a potentially huge market for embryonic stem-cell therapies that may one day restore all kinds of body parts for the sick and injured.

Yesterday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced a preliminary decision to invalidate three fundamental stem-cell patents held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the technology-transfer arm of the University of Wisconsin. Last year, two public-interest groups asked the patent office to re-examine those patents, arguing that they should never have been issued because their descriptions of human embryonic stem cells and the process for deriving them weren’t new. The patent office effectively agreed, finding that previous scientific publications and patents undermined WARF’s claimed innovations (decisions here, here and here (PDF), courtesy of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights).

WARF and its primary stem-cell business partner, Geron, have long used these patents to claim a monopoly of sorts over just about any therapy or diagnostic test that might emerge from stem-cell work. (WARF and Geron even tussled briefly in an acrimonious legal spat five years ago that ultimately led to a dramatic narrowing of Geron’s exclusive commercial rights over the cells.) Many academic researchers argue that the patents have had a chilling effect on stem-cell research, and some companies have complained about the cost of licensing them as well. Invitrogen, for instance, said it moved its stem-cell work overseas where the WARF patents don’t apply.

So the invalidation of the WARF patents could have a significant, albeit unpredictable, effect on the nascent science of stem cells. Some academic research might move ahead more quickly, although the relative paucity of major support from government or Big Pharma has so far presented a much bigger impediment to the work. On the commercial side, Geron could lose its remaining exclusive rights to derived neural, pancreatic and heart cells, leaving would-be competitors such as Novocell free to forge ahead — although David Greenwood, Geron’s chief financial officer, says the company’s own patent estate should shield it in that respect.

In fact, though, it may be years before anyone knows how this will all turn out. WARF said it will defend its patent claims “vigorously,” and has Geron’s support. The foundation will first argue its case directly with the patent examiner, and if that fails, will likely take its argument to a patent-appeal board. Even that board’s decision won’t be final, though, since WARF can always turn to the courts. At least by the time the process plays out, stem-cell science may have progressed far enough for us to know if all this arguing was really worth it in the first place.

The NYT has more info here.

(Note: This item has been copied over to the Life Sciences page from its original location on the VentureBeat main page. To view it in its original context, with comments, click here.)
The U.S. patent office has invalidated some key stem-cell patents, a significant move that could shake up a potentially huge market for embryonic stem-cell therapies that may one day restore all kinds of body parts for the sick and injured.

Yesterday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced a preliminary decision to invalidate three fundamental stem-cell patents held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the technology-transfer arm of the University of Wisconsin. Last year, two public-interest groups asked the patent office to re-examine those patents, arguing that they should never have been issued because their descriptions of human embryonic stem cells and the process for deriving them weren’t new. The patent office effectively agreed, finding that previous scientific publications and patents undermined WARF’s claimed innovations (decisions here, here and here (PDF), courtesy of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights).

WARF and its primary stem-cell business partner, Geron, have long used these patents to claim a monopoly of sorts over just about any therapy or diagnostic test that might emerge from stem-cell work. (WARF and Geron even tussled briefly in an acrimonious legal spat five years ago that ultimately led to a dramatic narrowing of Geron’s exclusive commercial rights over the cells.) Many academic researchers argue that the patents have had a chilling effect on stem-cell research, and some companies have complained about the cost of licensing them as well. Invitrogen, for instance, said it moved its stem-cell work overseas where the WARF patents don’t apply.

So the invalidation of the WARF patents could have a significant, albeit unpredictable, effect on the nascent science of stem cells. Some academic research might move ahead more quickly, although the relative paucity of major support from government or Big Pharma has so far presented a much bigger impediment to the work. On the commercial side, Geron could lose its remaining exclusive rights to derived neural, pancreatic and heart cells, leaving would-be competitors such as Novocell free to forge ahead — although David Greenwood, Geron’s chief financial officer, says the company’s own patent estate should shield it in that respect.

In fact, though, it may be years before anyone knows how this will all turn out. WARF said it will defend its patent claims “vigorously,” and has Geron’s support. The foundation will first argue its case directly with the patent examiner, and if that fails, will likely take its argument to a patent-appeal board. Even that board’s decision won’t be final, though, since WARF can always turn to the courts. At least by the time the process plays out, stem-cell science may have progressed far enough for us to know if all this arguing was really worth it in the first place.

The NYT has more info here.