Passionate about IP! Since June 2003 the IPKat has covered copyright, patent, trade mark, designs, info-tech and confidentiality issues from a mainly UK and European perspective. Read, post comments and participate!

The team is Eleonora Rosati, Annsley Merelle Ward and Merpel. E-mail the Kats here!

The team is joined by GuestKats Kevin Bercimuelle-Chamot, Jocelyn Bosse, Alessandro Cerri, Anastasiia Kyrylenko, Marcel Pemsel and Anna Maria Stein.

SpecialKats: Verónica Rodríguez Arguijo (TechieKat), Antonios Baris (Book Review Editor), Rose Hughes (PatKat) and Chijioke Okorie (Africa Correspondent).

InternKats: Asude Sena Moya and Söğüt Atilla.
Home / CJEU / CJEU reference / excluded subject matter / Jeremy Phillips / parthenotes / patentability / stem cells / BREAKING NEWS: breakfast ruling on unfertilised eggs

BREAKING NEWS: breakfast ruling on unfertilised eggs

- , , , , , ,
Ova and out! "AG Villalón's parthenotes Opinion in IMC could provide stem cell research certainty (at least for now...)" was the title of a helpful note by Shohta Ueno (an Associate with Allen & Overy's IP Litigation team in London) on the first stage of the Court of Justice's ruling in Case C-364/13 International Stem Cell Corporation v Comptroller General of Patents. This case, following a reference for a preliminary ruling from Henry Carr QC, sitting as a Deputy Judge in the Patents Court, England and Wales, seeks guidance on the following question:
Are unfertilised human ova whose division and further development have been stimulated by parthenogenesis, and which, in contrast to fertilised ova, contain only pluripotent cells and are incapable of developing into human beings, included in the term "human embryos" in Article 6(2)(c) of Directive 98/44/EC on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions?
This morning the CJEU ruled that:
"... in order to be classified as a ‘human embryo’, a non-fertilised human ovum must necessarily have the inherent capacity of developing into a human being. Consequently, the mere fact that a parthenogenetically-activated human ovum commences a process of development is not sufficient for it to be regarded as a ‘human embryo’".
The Curia media release is here. More Kat comments to follow ...
BREAKING NEWS: breakfast ruling on unfertilised eggs BREAKING NEWS: breakfast ruling on unfertilised eggs Reviewed by Jeremy on Thursday, December 18, 2014 Rating: 5

3 comments:

  1. AnonymousThursday, 18 December 2014 at 12:17:00 GMT

    Good, clear judgment which refrained from going down the route of the AG who suggeste ddealing with genetic manipulations a spart of th enotion. However, this judgment will be buried in the light of the other big judgments out today- obesity could be a disability and non-EU family members don’t need visa to enter UK.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousThursday, 18 December 2014 at 14:59:00 GMT

    Clearly a judgment very much limited to the specific facts. Brustle probably went to far in defining 'human embryo' and so this judgment is essentially cutting the definition back a little in the insistence that the ovum/parthenote has to have the ability to develop into a human being.

    With no criticism meant of the judgment what these CJEU cases are not giving us are broad guidelines on what it is to be 'human' or an 'embryo'. Parthenotes only develop to 5 days, but suppose they were made to develop further and have functioning neuronal systems?

    There are discussions happening out there about whether 'disabled' embryos are 'embryos', e.g. having a gene knocked out that prevents development beyond a certain point (see https://cbhd.org/content/ethical-embryonic-stem-cell-research). Parthenotes could be seen to be disabled embryos, which has implications for how they should be treated.

    The decision was correct, but it avoided a comprehensive discussion of the issue, and I am unsure as to whether that was a lost opportunity.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousThursday, 18 December 2014 at 15:59:00 GMT

    For this particular Court made up of judges who now come from some hugely conservative MS notably the new MS (a pre-2004 bench would be very different) and with a reporting judge from the most conservative of them all on issues such as this one -this was a very generous judgment.And for a Grand Chamber judgment, there is very little to demonstrate that there was dissent which usually leads to the odd strange paragraph being inserted in there.In particular, the oddities in the AG's opinion were not taken over (e.g. MS can still prohibit, manipulation should be avoided).They also stuck to the question as asked to enable the national judge to resolve the dispute before them.

    ReplyDelete

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

Subscribe to: Post Comments ( Atom )
Powered by Blogger.