Experimental Confirmation Of Expected Outcome Obvious Over Prior Art

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a district court’s judgment of non-infringement of two patents relating to cryopreserved human neonatal or fetal hematopoietic stem cells from umbilical cord or placental blood, and reversed the judgment that the patents were not invalid for obviousness. PharmaStem Therapeutics Inc. v. ViaCell Inc., Case Nos. 05-1490, -1551 (Fed. Cir., July 9, 2007) (Bryson, J.; Newman, J., dissenting).

PharmaStem sued six defendants alleging that the defendants had infringed two patents owned by PharmaStem, U.S. Patent No. B1 5,004,681 (the ’681 patent) and U.S. Patent No. 5,192,553 (the ’553 patent), a continuation-in-part of the ’681 patent. The patents in suit recite compositions and methods relating to a medical procedure for treating persons with compromised blood and immune systems. The treatment is based on the discovery that blood from a newborn infant’s umbilical cord is a rich source of a type of stem cells useful for rebuilding an