Take Off, Bob And Doug!

Like millions of people around the world, I watched the successful launch of Dragon Endeavour on May 30, 2020. Today, May 31, 2020, I was thrilled to see Dragon Endeavour safely dock to International Space Station ("ISS"), and astronauts Bob (Behnken) and Doug (Hurley) - neither of whom called the other a "hoser" even once during their spaceflight - float into ISS to join colleagues Chris Cassidy, Anatoly Ivanishin, and Ivan Vagner. Wonderful!  It's a beauty way to go.

Diamond In The Rough

Professor Jared Diamond (University of California Los Angeles) is a rare example of an academic whose expertise spans disparate fields of inquiry.  In his career, he has made important contributions in physiology, ecology, and geography.  Outside academia, Diamond has also been a influential writer of best-selling books intended for general audiences.  His most recent book was prescient, being published in 2019, just before the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic and worldwide economic collapse:  Upheaval - Turning Points for Nations in Crisis.  Also well worth reading is his commentary,  Jared Diamond: lessons from a pandemic - The coronavirus crisis should usher in an age of global co-operation, argues the Pulitzer Prize-winning geographer, published in the Financial Times on May 27, 2020.

Corvid And Covid

My colleague, Professor Carl Bergstrom (University of Washington Department of Biology) has been, and continues to be, a rigorous and rational voice on SARS-CoV-2 and the Covid-19 it appears to cause.  Here is an informative interview Bergstrom did with CNBC, published on April 9, 2020.  He also loves corvids.

Out Of Thin Air

On April 18, 2020,  brilliant inventor of an improved pulse oximeter, Takuo Aoyagi, passed away.  The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ("IEEE") published a nice obituary on May 22, 2020, in IEEE Spectrum.

Steal This Idea!

In a November 19, 2019, article entitled The fight to halt the theft of ideas is hopeless:  China will not accept inferiority — and the west should not want it to, economics writer for the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, offered a sobering assessment of the current struggle over intellectual property and technological supremacy between China and the United States.

Kiwis Crush Covid-19

In an article entitled New Zealand eliminates COVID-19, medical journal, The Lancet, describes the steps New Zealand took not simply to "flatten the curve", but to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 from its islands.  Happily for the Kiwis, Covid-19 has gone the way of the moa in Aotearoa.

Second Thoughts On The Last Dance

Louisa Thomas published a thoughtful and insightful review of The Last Dance on April 20, 2020, in The New Yorker.

First Impressions Of The Last Dance

I just finished watching The Last Dance.  The biggest thing I learned is that, focused as I was on graduate school, I largely missed what happened in the 1990s NBA.  So, although the documentary revisits the Chicago Bulls' famous twin three-peats, I realized I was watching them for the first time.  Despite the involvement of Michael Jordan's company, Jump 23, in the production of the The Last Dance, the reality of the basketball footage alone convinced me that Jordan was every bit the superlative player of his legend.

Yes, I already knew he was good, but watching him bend the outcomes of games and series to his will, against a succession of superb teams and players, was a revelation.  Six NBA championships brought tremendous joy to Chicago Bulls players, staffs, and fans.  Yet, the documentary depicted enough conflict, hectoring, and cruelty to temper these accomplishments with a unavoidable sense of tristesse.

The Last Dance is excellent.  Nevertheless, it is valuable that the future is sure to add additional perspectives on a fabulous chapter in basketball history.

Immunity Passports

In a May 21, 2020, comment, entitled Ten reasons why immunity passports are a bad idea
Restricting movement on the basis of biology threatens freedom, fairness and public health, published in the journal Nature, Natalie Kofler and Françoise Baylis discuss the disadvantages of SARS-CoV-2 immunity passports.

DiagNo!

The United States Food and Drug Adminstration ("FDA") has listed almost 30 SARS-CoV-2 antibody-detection products as unapproved for sale.  This reflects the challenges of developing, and obtaining licensure for, such diagnostic tests.  The crowd of products ordered off the market also illustrates how great the market opportunity for such tests is perceived to be.

Hope Takes Flight

Warranted or not, this week saw fragile hopes rise of a vaccine effective against SARS-CoV-2.  This reminded of Emily Dickinson's lovely enigmatic poem Hope:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
​Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Patients Beyond The Patent Pale

The Guardian newspaper ran this op-ed on May 20, 2020, provocatively-entitled "Could a patent get in between you and a Covid-19 test? Yes".

WHO Wants Patents

The May 20, 2020, issue of the Financial Times (United Kingdom edition) contains an article entitled "US backs away from WHO move on access to Covid-19 treatments" that discusses calls to grant access to patents claiming inventions relevant to SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19.

Moderna Love

Here is a relatively sober STAT article on the Moderna vaccine news that rocked markets worldwide on May 18, 2020.  Fingers crossed that this story lives up to the excitement surrounding it.

Dead Men Tell New Tales

Here is a cool lecture on prehistoric human genomics by ancient DNA luminary Professor David Reich (Harvard Medical School), which he delivered at the 2019 Allen Frontiers Symposium:

Covid-19 Research Trove

A collaboration of firms and nonprofits has assembled a huge open collection of research, called the COVID-19 Open Research Data Set (“CORD-19”) to help promote understanding, diagnoses, and treatments related to SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19.

Tough Luck

The United States Supreme Court ("Supremes") unanimously decided LUCKY BRAND DUNGAREES, INC., ET AL. v. MARCEL FASHIONS GROUP, INC. on May 14, 2020.  Although the underlying dispute concerned a clash of  clothing trademarks including "Get Lucky" and "Lucky Brand", a central issue in the case concerned a legal theory called "defense preclusion".  Here the Supremes rejected defense preclusion.

Writing for the court, Justice Sotomayor provides this short summary of the posture of the case:

This case arises from protracted litigation between petitioners Lucky Brand Dungarees, Inc., and others (collectively Lucky Brand) and respondent Marcel Fashions Group, Inc. (Marcel). In the latest lawsuit between the two, Lucky Brand asserted a defense against Marcel that it had not pressed fully in a preceding suit between the parties.  This Court is asked to determine whether Lucky Brand’s failure to litigate the defense in the earlier suit barred Lucky Brand from invoking it in the later suit. Because the parties agree that, at a minimum, the preclusion of such a defense in this context requires that the two suits share the same claim to relief—and because we find that the two suits here did not— Lucky Brand was not barred from raising its defense in the later action. 

She concludes as follows:

At bottom, Marcel’s 2011 Action challenged different conduct—and raised different claims—from the 2005 Action.  Under those circumstances, Marcel cannot preclude Lucky Brand from raising new defenses. The judgment of the Second Circuit is therefore reversed, and the case is remanded for proceedings consistent with this opinion. 

Regardless of which company got lucky in this round, endless expensive litigation over a trademark covering a common English word seems anything but lucky for either firm.

Rational Optimist On Covid-19

Here is a Spectator interview with the incomparable Dr. Matt Ridley on understanding and taming SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19:

Covid-19 Guidance Goes Viral

The Associated Press has reported on a Centers for Disease Control ("CDC") SARS-CoV-2 guidance apparently not released to the public.

Dedication-Disclosure Slayback

On May 8, 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ("CAFC") decided Eagle Pharmaceuticals v. Slayback Pharma.  Slayback - a moniker that clearly represents a missed naming opportunity in the field of heavy metal bands - evokes exactly what happened to Eagle Pharmaceuticals, whose four asserted patents the CAFC found not to have been infringed on the pleadings.  Representative claim 1 of its United States Patent No. 9,572,796 ("'796 patent") recites, among other elements, "a pharmaceutically acceptable fluid comprising a mixture of polyethylene glycol and propylene glycol".

Eagle Pharmaceuticals invoked the doctrine of equivalents "assert[ing] that the ethanol in Slayback [Pharma]’s product is insubstantially different from the propylene glycol ("PG") in the claimed composition."  In response, Slayback Pharma "argued that the disclosure-dedication doctrine barred Eagle [Pharma]’s claim of infringement under the doctrine of equivalents because the asserted patents disclose, but do not claim, ethanol as an alternative solvent to PG. The '796 patent also disclosed "ethanol"".

The CAFC affirmed the decision of the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, finding as follows:

Here, we conclude that the only reasonable inference that can be made from the patent disclosures is that a skilled artisan would understand the patents to disclose ethanol as an alternative to the claimed PG.  Nothing in the record permits us to infer that a skilled artisan “would have understood that the patent specification describes distinct categories of formulations that contain different ingredients and work in different ways.” Appellant Br. 44.  As a result, even when viewing the pleadings in the light most favorable to Eagle, we conclude there is no material issue of fact to resolve and Slayback is entitled to judgment in its favor as a matter of law.

Both the district and appeals courts decided Eagle Pharma's arguments flew in the face of the dedication-disclosure doctrine.

Appealing Faithless Electors

The wonderful United States Supreme Court news website, Scotusblog, recently published a webinar discussing the law of so-called "faithless electors".  The law governing electors is fascinating in and of itself.  As a bonus, the webinar also explains the civil procedure of Supreme Court appeals.

Antibodies And Regulatory Bodies

A recent post by Professors Nicholson Price, Rachel Sachs, Jacob Sherkow, and Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, on Professor Ouellette's superb Written Description blog, entitled How is regulatory policy influencing the development and marketing of antibody testing for COVID-19?, discusses the regulatory approval process for diagnostic tests for detecting antibodies to SARS-CoV-2.

Alice's Adventures In Patentland

The Electronic Frontier Foundation ("EFF") published on its website an article named "The Patent Office Is “Adjusting” to a Supreme Court Ruling by Ignoring It" on May 7, 2020.  In it Alex Moss ("Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents and Staff Attorney") argues that "the Patent Office decided to work around that decision, so that the door to bogus software patents could swing open once again."

Test Of Time

Dr. Brian Cleary, a Fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, recently posted a preprint on medRχiv of a brilliant article, entitled Efficient prevalence estimation and infected sample identification with group testing for SARS-CoV-2, that explains how substantially to speed up testing for SARS-CoV-2.

Patent League Table

Here is an animation published by the World Intellectual Property Organization illustrating which countries filed the most PCT ("Patent Cooperation Treaty") applications from 2005 to 2019.  Notice the rise of Chinese and Korean PCTs.

Virology Now!

The Global Virome Project ("GVP") describes its mission as follows:

Develop an innovative network partnership among public, private, philanthropic and civil organizations to detect the majority of our planet’s unknown viral threats to human health and food security within 10-years to prepare for and stop future epidemics

The GVP elaborates its goals in this video:

SHERLOCK Detects SARS-CoV-2

Here is a valuable advance in SARS-CoV-2 detection from the Broad Institute:

Wisdom Of Pearls

Professor Sean O'Connor (George Mason University) shares his perspectives on how to reopen an economy devastated by SARS-CoV-2 and the Covid-19 it causes.

Riding Herd On SARS-CoV-2

Professors Carl T. Bergstrom (University of Washington) and Natalie E. Dean (University of Florida) make a strong argument against the goal of achieving herd immunity against SARS-CoV-2, and the Covid-19 this virus causes, in the May 1, 2020, New York Times.  The title of their article starkly conveys the essence of their dire public policy message:  "What the Proponents of ‘Natural’ Herd Immunity Don’t Say - Try to reach it without a vaccine, and millions will die."

Viral Untruths

Agence France-Press ("AFP") maintains a website dedicated to verifying the truth of media claims.  Here is its effort to fact-check media claims related to SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19.

EUAphoria

In an exceptional May Day decision, the United States Food and Drug Administration ("FDA") issued an Emergency Use Authorization ("EUA") "for emergency use of remdesivir for the treatment of
hospitalized 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patients".  The EUA describes remdesivir as

a direct acting antiviral drug that inhibits viral RNA synthesis.  It is an investigational drug and is not currently approved for any indication.  Remdesivir has activity in cell culture and animal models against SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2. 

It then outlines the scientific evidence undergirding its decision:

Based on review of the topline data from the randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial conducted by NIAID (NCT04280705) and from the Gilead-sponsored open-label trial that evaluated different durations of remdesivir (NCT04292899), it is reasonable to believe that the known and potential benefits of RDV outweigh the known and potential risks of the drug for the treatment of patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19.

Finally, the EUA explains the statutory basis for authorizing use of remdesivir: 

Having concluded that the criteria for issuance of this authorization under 564(c) of the Act are met, I am authorizing the emergency use of remdesivir for treatment of COVID-19, as described in the Scope of Authorization section of this letter (Section II) and subject to the terms of this authorization.  

There is no guarantee that further data regarding the performance of remdesivir will be similarly positive.  However, the EUA does indicate that the FDA has high hopes for this drug in combating SARS-CoV-2 and the Covid-19 disease it causes.