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ARTICLE · 01 AUGUST 2023

The USPTO Said What??

Osha Bergman Watanabe & Burton LLP
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In SNIPR Techs. Ltd. v. Rockefeller Univ.,[1] the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) recently held that "pure AIA patents and applications" – those that have only ever contained...

United StatesIntellectual Property
Peter C. Schechter
Peter C. Schechter
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In SNIPR Techs. Ltd. v. Rockefeller Univ.,1 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) recently held that "pure AIA patents and applications" – those that have only ever contained claims with post-AIA effective filing dates (i.e., on or after March 16, 2013) – can never be involved in a pre-AIA "interference," the Patent Office procedure used to determine "priority of invention" when the United States still had a first-to-invent patent system. This result should surprise no one; shockingly, however, it appears to have come as a surprise to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office itself.

The facts and procedural aspects of SNIPR Techs are straightforward. SNIPR owns a family of patents directed to methods of selectively killing bacteria in a mixed set of bacteria using clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) gene editing. The effective filing date of the patents is May 3, 2016, more than three years after the effective date of

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