Category: Biotech/Pharma News

By Kevin E. Noonan — As the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted life throughout the world this spring, bats have been a prominent feature in news stories and recriminations about how the pandemic started (and being blamed even more than happenings in China, although to be fair the effects of the pandemic, good and bad, have…

By Kevin E. Noonan — The domesticated chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus, is the most numerous domestic animal and a preferred source of animal protein.  Chicken domestication has been thought (based on traditional measures) to have arisen in the Holocene (beginning ~11,650 years ago) from related species subspecies of wild jungle fowl, including five subspecies of…

By Kevin E. Noonan — Genetic instability has long been recognized as a hallmark of oncogenesis and tumor progression.  The phenomenon was first identified cytogenetically, most famously by the Philadelphia chromosome in chronic myelogenous leukemia (see Wapner, The Philadelphia Chromosome: A Genetic Mystery, a Lethal Cancer, and the Improbable Invention of a Lifesaving Treatment), later…

To a Mouse, by Robert Burns Little, cunning, cowering, timorous beast,Oh, what a panic is in your breast!You need not start away so hastyWith bickering prattle!I would be loath to run and chase you,With murdering paddle! I'm truly sorry man's dominionHas broken Nature's social union,And justifies that ill opinionWhich makes you startleAt me, your poor,…

By Kevin E. Noonan — The inherent, ineluctable unpredictability of biology can be the basis for biological patent claims being non-obvious (lacking the requisite "reasonable expectation of success"; see, e.g., OSI Pharmaceuticals v. Apotex) and for the greater quantum of disclosure necessary to satisfy the written description and enablement requirements of § 112 (see, e.g.,…

By Kevin E. Noonan — Lions (Panthera leo) once were a widely distributed group of terrestrial mammals, ranging during the Pleistocene (from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago) in Eurasia, Africa, and North America, with species that included the still-extant modern lions (Panthera leo leo), the cave lion (Panthera leo spelaea), and the American lion…

By Kevin E. Noonan — The human tendency to identify with tribes of "like" humans (related by family, place of origin, or religion, among other bases) was perverted during the Twentieth Century (and in some places remains so today) into the idea of "purity" along racial lines.  The foolishness of this thinking, insofar as it…

By Kevin E. Noonan — Gregor Mendel's great good fortune (or extraordinary prescience) was that he chose for the traits he used to illustrate the genetic control of inheritance (despite having no inkling of its mechanism) traits in his pea plants that were controlled by discrete genes (yellow v green, wrinkled v smooth, tall v…

By Donald Zuhn –- Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued two reports suggesting that declining private investment and lack of innovation in the development of new antibiotics is undermining efforts to combat drug-resistant infections.  The WHO reports address fifty antibiotics (and ten antibacterial biologics) that are currently in clinical and preclinical development (see…

By Kevin E. Noonan — Left-handedness is a uniquely human trait, with 90% human populations globally being right-handed since the Paleolithic (extending from 3.3 million years ago to the end of the Pleistocene).  A feature of motor control, the prevailing theory is that handedness is a consequence of language being "lateralized to the left hemisphere";…