A company that pays people to poke holes in patents says it is about to claim its first biotech victim.
BountyQuest gave Holger Blasum, a computer science graduate student at the University of Munich, a $10,000 award for digging up research papers from 1993 and 1994 issues of Nucleic Acids Research.
The papers will be used to challenge a 1999 patent held by the California company Incyte Genomics entitled 鈥淒atabase and system for storing, comparing and displaying genomic information鈥�.
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Examples of 鈥減rior art鈥� are valuable because they can be used to invalidate patents. BountyQuest capitalises on this by charging companies to put up rewards for such examples on its website (). Anyone can then try their hand at busting the patent.
BountyQuest鈥檚 head, Charles Cella, says his clients are sometimes other companies who want to challenge a competitor鈥檚 grip on a technology and occasionally patent holders who want to test the strength of their claims. He won鈥檛 say who posted the Incyte bounty.
鈥淔undamentally useful鈥�
Lee Bendekgey, general counsel for Incyte, says he is glad of the discovery. 鈥淲e haven鈥檛 started licensing that patent yet, so it is much better to know if there are problems with it now,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t is fundamentally useful information.鈥�
BountyQuest has been running for six months. So far, it has only paid out on six of its 70 or so bounties. The five previous awards all involved electronics or computing patents (快猫短视频, 10 February, p 14).
鈥淏ut we are starting to see more activity on the biotech and genome side of things,鈥� says Cella. This could herald the huge patent battles experts say are looming over intellectual property associated with the human and other genome sequences.