Patent decision

BL number

O/329/11

Concerning rights in

GB 0901645.2

Hearing Officer

Dr L Cullen

Decision date

27 September 2011

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Dr Mohamed Mohamed Adel El-Sokkary

Provisions discussed

PA 1977, sections 1(1)(b), 1(2)(d)

Keywords

Inventive step

Related Decisions

None

Summary

International patent application PCT/EG2007/000028 entered the UK national phase as GB 0901645.2 and was re-published as GB 2455013 on 3 June 2009. This application describes the use of sequence data for the Dihydropteroate synthase (DHPS) gene to construct a phylogenetic tree from more than 260 publically available bacterial species and strains which are relevant to infection and disease in humans. This phylogenetic classification system based on the DHPS gene sequence of each bacterial species can then be used to identify and classify unknown bacterial species based on a comparison of their DHPS gene sequence with those in the classification tree.

The hearing officer identified the skilled person as a microbiologist / genetic engineer familiar with micro-organisms such as bacteria and their role in causing disease and with techniques for identifying such micro-organisms, using both laboratory-based and computer-based techniques. The common general knowledge of this skilled person would include knowledge of how to undertake genetic sequencing, how to find specific nucleotide sequences in a public sequence database and the fact that sequence alignments can be used to construct phylogenetic tree based on either nucleotide or amino acid sequences. The hearing officer held that the inventive concept of the claimed invention was the use of DHPS gene sequence alignments (i.e. nucleotide sequences), or the phylogenetic tree resulting from comparing such alignments, for the classification, identification and detection of bacterial species. The prior art taught that the DHPS gene has some utility in phylogenetic classification, identification and detection because it worked for strains of the fungal pathogen Pneumocystis carinii and, in addition, that it will also work with some of the more common bacterial pathogens relevant to human health.

The application was thus refused as lacking an inventive step