A unanimous Supreme Court invalidated Amgen's antibody patents for failing to enable the full scope of what they claimed. The decision revives a demanding, century-old conception of the patent bargain with particular force in the life sciences.
Reversing a $1.2 billion verdict, the Federal Circuit held that a CAR-T patent claiming any antibody binding element failed written description because it disclosed no representative species or common structure for the vast scFv genus.
A specification that disclosed a single rapamycin compound could not support claims reaching tens of thousands of structurally diverse molecules, the Federal Circuit held, because finding the active ones required excessive screening.
The Federal Circuit erased the largest patent verdict in U.S. history, holding that a functional nucleoside genus spanning billions of candidate molecules was neither enabled nor adequately described.
