- Court
- Madras High Court
- Date of judgment
- Judge
- Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy
- Outcome
- Set aside
Headnote
Refusal of an anti-CD38 antibody application set aside. On section 3(c) the Court held that the claims could not be treated as the discovery of a non-living substance occurring in nature merely because the organism specified in the sequence listing was homo sapiens; that conclusion would be justified only if the appellant had found a hitherto unknown antibody and isolated it from nature, whereas the antibody here was developed on a transgenic mouse platform and the annotation recorded the most homologous organism. On inventive step the Court found no basis for the conclusion that the invention lacked technical advancement, the appellant having shown structurally novel CDR sequences and functional advances in cytotoxicity and tumour inhibition supported by expert affidavits, and the cited prior art having been before the ISA, the EPO and the USPTO.
Headnote by BRB Legal, written from the judgment: a summary for reference, not legal advice. Read the judgment itself before relying on it.