Patenting AI Tools of Drug Discovery
Downstream Claims
Having drafted many patents on the AI aspects of AI tools of drug discovery, we now endeavor to draft “downstream claims” that capture the value of the downstream product that emerges from the commercial implementation of AI tools in the drug development pipeline (e.g., a therapeutic agent that passes through preclinical and clinical study to emerge as a multi-billion blockbuster drug).
Product-By-Process Claims
As a gateway to the downstream claims, we draft “product-by-process” claims that impart the backend ingenuity of AI tools to their frontend output. We use a patentable and structural characterization of the frontend output as the underpinning of a downstream claim that covers later stages of the drug development pipeline like target discovery and lead discovery.
PrimateAI Case Study
We use the patented disclosure of a leading variant classification tool called PrimateAI as a case study to demonstrate how our downstream claims, informed by by our product-by-process claims, advance PrimateAI to later stages of the drug development pipeline.
The author is a bioinformatics attorney, not a biotechnology attorney.
Patenting AI is its infancy, and it may well be another five years before patent law achieves some measure of predictability on this subject.
In an exercise of unlawyerly incaution, the author explores some creative frameworks for patenting AI based on the pertinent case law and author’s eight years of patenting AI.
The author’s quest for the chimeric approach that combines the claiming of downstream product production with AI claiming will continue.