On April 22, 2024, the PTAB issued final written decisions in IPR2023-00070 and IPR2023-00074, filed by Bluebird Bio on two patents related to recombinant lentiviral vectors — U.S. Patent Nos. 7,541,179 and 8,058,061, owned by Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. The PTAB ruled that all challenged claims of the ’179 patent (claims 1, 10, 19, and 22) and the ’061 patent (claims 1, 2, 5-8, 11, and 15) are valid and are not anticipated or obvious over prior art references. The patents had an effective filing date before March 16, 2013, and therefore the pre-AIA version of §§ 102 and 103 applied. The PTAB found that one reference, a thesis at Cornell University, did not qualify as prior art under 102(a) because it represented the work of one of the inventors of the patents, and did not qualify as prior art under 102(b) because it was not publicly available one year before the priority date. The PTAB also ruled that additional references, including an article authored by an inventor, did not anticipate or render obvious the challenged claims.
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