NEW ZEALAND screen and monitor technology company PureDepth is seeking an injunction to enforce its patents against the Asian giants of the television and monitor market, including Korean giant LG.
PureDepth, whose majority 52% owner is Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall’s investment vehicle K1W1, is taking on a company called NCP Trading in the High Court at Auckland.
While NCP, a small local importer of Konka-branded televisions, is a relative minnow, LG has joined the proceedings and it is possible others, such as Samsung, will too.
That’s because if PureDepth wins the case, the precedent could have global implications and affect a much broader range of television manufacturers, perhaps forcing them to license PureDepth’s technology.
According to a judgement of the High Court at Auckland, PureDepth disassembled a Konka TV expecting to find componentry from a Taiwanese company CMO, with which it had previously tried to negotiate a licensing agreement. Instead it found componentry from LG which it also felt breached its patent. Another television contained similar componentry from Samsung.
According to affidavits filed with the court, LG intends to file a counterclaim for revocation of the patent concerned. It appears as if that counterclaim will be based on a claim of “prior art”, or that the invention patented by PureDepth already existed, under a Japanese patent.
PureDepth says it holds an identical patent for the technology in the US, meaning a result in New Zealand could have much broader implications for television manufacturers and component makers.
“If this contention is true, and if PureDepth is successful in obtaining a finding of infringement of the New Zealand patent by way of the Konka television sets having LG backlighting display units, then such a judgement may well have considerable commercial ramifications in the US marketplace, being one of vastly greater size than that of New Zealand,” Justice Fogarty writes in allowing LG to join the case and placing it on a fast track for further hearing.
PureDepth chief executive officer Andy Wood was not prepared to comment on the case.
The company, which holds 86 patents and has a further 64 pending according to Wood, is in the process of deregistering from the US OTC Bulletin Board, a subsidiary trading system of the Nasdaq high technology stock exchange.
Bleeding cash, it has slashed staff worldwide and refocused on two core markets: providing technology for Japan’s massive Pachinko and Pachislot gaming market and a new mobile platform Wood was not prepared to discuss, apart from saying he was in discussions with several well-known companies to evaluate PureDepth’s systems.
Wood says most of the remaining staff in Auckland are focused on research and development. The company has sufficient capital to continue operations through revenue from a licensing agreement with New York-listed International Game Technologies. It also licences to Sanyo.
PureDepth was founded in 1999 as Deep Video Imaging by Power Beat founder Peter Witehira and Gabriel Engel. Witehira was the inventor of a “never go flat” car battery. Witehira settled a long-running disagreement with Tindall in 2004, selling his stake in the Deep Video Imaging for $520,000.
Tindall’s Warehouse does not sell Konka televisions. Dick Smith does.
A federal judge on Monday struck down patents on two genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer. The decision, if upheld, could throw into doubt the patents covering thousands of human genes and reshape the law of intellectual property.
United States District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet issued the 152-page decision, which invalidated seven patents related to the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, whose mutations have been associated with cancer.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York joined with individual patients and medical organizations to challenge the patents last May: they argued that genes, products of nature, fall outside of the realm of things that can be patented. The patents, they argued, stifle research and innovation and limit testing options.
Myriad Genetics, the company that holds the patents with the University of Utah Research Foundation, asked the court to dismiss the case, claiming that the work of isolating the DNA from the body transforms it and makes it patentable. Such patents, it said, have been granted for decades; the Supreme Court upheld patents on living organisms in 1980. In fact, many in the patent field had predicted the courts would throw out the suit.
Judge Sweet, however, ruled that the patents were “improperly granted” because they involved a “law of nature.” He said that many critics of gene patents considered the idea that isolating a gene made it patentable “a ‘lawyer’s trick’ that circumvents the prohibition on the direct patenting of the DNA in our bodies but which, in practice, reaches the same result.”
The case could have far-reaching implications. About 20 percent of human genes have been patented, and multibillion-dollar industries have been built atop the intellectual property rights that the patents grant.
“If a decision like this were upheld, it would have a pretty significant impact on the future of medicine,” said Kenneth Chahine, a visiting law professor at the University of Utah who filed an amicus brief on the side of Myriad. He said that medicine was becoming more personalized, with genetic tests used not only to diagnose diseases but to determine which medicine was best for which patient.
Mr. Chahine, who once ran a biotechnology company, said the decision could also make it harder for young companies to raise money from investors. “The industry is going to have to get more creative about how to retain exclusivity and attract capital in the face of potentially weaker patent protection,” he said.
Edward Reines, a patent lawyer who represents biotechnology firms but was not involved in the case, said loss of patent protection could diminish the incentives for genetic research.
“The genetic tools to solve the major health problems of our time have not been found yet,” said Mr. Reines, who is with the Silicon Valley office of the firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges. “These are the discoveries we want to motivate by providing incentives to all the researchers out there.”
The lawsuit also challenged the patents on First Amendment grounds, but Judge Sweet ruled that because the issues in the case could be decided within patent law, the constitutional question need not be decided.
The decision is likely to be appealed. Representatives of Myriad did not return calls seeking comment. But this month, the company’s chief executive, Peter Meldrum, told investors that “regardless of the outcome of this particular lawsuit, it will not have a material adverse effect on the company,” or its future revenues, according to the Pharmacogenomics Reporter, “or on the future revenues of our products.”
Myriad sells a test costing more than $3,000 that looks for mutations in the two genes to determine if a woman is at a high risk of getting breast cancer and ovarian cancer. Plaintiffs in the case had said Myriad’s monopoly on the test, conferred by the gene patents, kept prices high and prevented women from getting a confirmatory test from another laboratory.
Janice Oh, a spokeswoman for the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, which represented the Patent and Trademark Office in the case, had no comment.
One of the individual plaintiffs in the suit, Genae Girard, who has breast cancer and has been tested for ovarian cancer, applauded the decision as “a big turning point for all women in the country that may have breast cancer that runs in their family.” Chris Hansen, an A.C.L.U. staff lawyer, said: “The human genome, like the structure of blood, air or water, was discovered, not created. There is an endless amount of information on genes that begs for further discovery, and gene patents put up unacceptable barriers to the free exchange of ideas.”
Bryan Roberts, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, said the decision could push more work aimed at discovering genes and diagnostic tests to universities. “The government is going to become the funder for content discovery because it’s going to be very hard to justify it outside of academia.”
John Ball, executive vice president of the American Society for Clinical Pathology, one of the plaintiffs in the case, called the decision “a big deal.”
“It’s good for patients and patient care, it’s good for science and scientists,” he said. “It really opens up things.”
Let’s say you find a lump somewhere and decide to go in for an exam. And let’s say there was a little box to check that allows you to get a shot that targets and kills cancerous cells right then and there, no surgery, no waiting, and possibly no radiation or chemo therapy down the road. Would you check the box?
These nanoshells target tumors in the lungs and, upon excitation with near-infrared light, destroy only the cancerous tissue. (Credit: The Alliance for NanoHealth)
Since time matters when it comes to cancer, the creation of a single nanoparticle–traceable in real time via MRI–that tags and zaps cancer cells all in one procedure has a team of researchers raising their eyebrows in hopeful arches.
“Some of the most essential questions in nanomedicine today are about biodistribution–where particles go inside the body and how they get there,” says Naomi Halas, a nanomedicine pioneer at Rice University in Houston, Texas, whose findings have just been published in Advanced Functional Materials. “Noninvasive tests for biodistribution will be enormously useful on the path to FDA approval, and this technique–adding MRI functionality to the particle you’re testing and using for therapy–is a very promising way of doing this.”
The all-in-one particles are modeled on nanoshells, a cancer treatment Halas invented in the ’90s that are now in human clinical trials. The shells harvest laser light that would typically pass through the body harmlessly and convert that light into heat that destroys cancerous cells.
Tracking the nanoparticles by their fluorescence, the team confirmed that the particles do indeed target cancer cells and kill them with heat. Even though human clinical trials are probably a few years out, the hope is that eventually patients will be able to get a shot with a cocktail of these nanoparticles and antibodies tailored to specific cancer types, and then sit back and watch the war on tumors in real time via MRI and/or NIR imaging.
Halas adds that the team has been careful to choose components that are either already approved for medical use or are already in clinical trials: “We’re putting together components that all have good, proven track records.”
Next week, engineers at the Large Hadron Collider will prepare the particle-smasher to run at 7 teraelectronvolts (TeV) – half the energy it was designed for. So what will it find?
Greg Landsberg, a member of the CMS collaboration, which operates one of the four experiments at the LHC, says the first few months should generate accurate measurements of the properties of particles like the W and Z bosons and the top quark.
Particles that hint at extra dimensions or supersymmetry could also be discovered during the run, provided they are light enough – although probably not until at least the latter half of 2010, he says. Higgs particles in the lighter predicted range could be produced, but they may be hidden by background signals.
After two years at 7 TeV, the collider will be shut down for the whole of 2012 to check the splices between the superconducting magnets, one of which failed disastrously in 2008. In 2013 the energy will be ramped up to its maximum of 14 TeV. The LHC’s operators are being cautious, “but given what happened in 2008, who can blame them?” says Jon Butterworth of the UK ATLAS collaboration, another LHC experiment.
IBM said Wednesday that it has agreed to buy Initiate Systems, a privately held company that makes software designed to help health care companies manage and share information.
Initiate’s software is geared toward customers in both the private sector and government, all of whom deal with a huge amount of health care information across different systems. Initiate’s Interoperable Health software tries to help health care companies and government agencies more quickly find and share patient and clinical data, thereby saving them time and money.
The company’s customers run the gamut from health care payers to providers to prescription drug sellers and include Alberta Ministry of Health and Wellness, Calgary Health Region, CVS/Caremark, Humana, North Dakota’s Department of Health and Human Services, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
“With the addition of Initiate’s software and its industry expertise, IBM will offer clients a comprehensive solution for delivering the information they need to improve the well-being of patients at a lower cost,” said Arvind Krishna, general manager of Information Management at IBM, in a statement. “Similarly, our government clients will now have even more capabilities for gathering and making use of information to serve citizens in a timely and efficient manner.”
No financial details were given. Subject to the usual regulatory approvals, the acquisition should close in the first quarter of this year. IBM said it then plans to merger Initiate with its Information Management operations.
High-tech companies have been showing a growing interest in the health care sector, which is moving more and more toward electronic record-keeping. In December, Microsoft said that it plans to buy Sentillion, which supplies software to health care professionals.
The buyout of Initiate marks IBM’s 30th acquisition in the area of information and analytics. Over the past couple of years, Big Blue has been on a roll picking up new companies and ended 2009 with several businesses in its shopping cart.
Functional MRI scans of a healthy control subject and five patients with traumatic brain injury show activations associated with the motor imagery as compared with spatial imagery tasks (yellow and red) and the spatial imagery as compared with motor imagery tasks (blue and green). (Credit: New England Journal of Medicine)
It all started in 2006, when researchers were studying a young woman considered to be in a vegetative state. Using MRI to scan her brain, they asked her to imagine herself playing tennis and touring her own home, and found that her brain behaved in much the way a normally functioning brain does.
The neuroscientists were shocked into action as news of what may have only been an anomaly prompted families to ask that the researchers study their own loved ones, too.
While the majority of the patients exhibited no brain activity via MRI scans, four considered to be in vegetative states did and one thought to be minimally conscious did. Three of these five patients actually showed signs of awareness during intensive standard bedside tests, while two did not.
Moreover one of the patients, a 29-year-old in Belgium asked to answer questions indicating “yes” by thinking about tennis and “no” by mentally touring his own home, answered every single question about his life–from his father’s name to whether he had siblings–correctly.
“He could produce no communication with his body, but he could systematically and repeatedly change his brain activity to indicate ‘yes’ or ‘no’ with 100 percent accuracy,” Owen says. “These are patients who are totally unable to perform functions with their bodies–even blink an eye or move an eyebrow–but yet are entirely conscious. It’s quite distressing, really, to realize this.”
There are some 20,000 Americans thought to be in vegetative states, which means that even if doctors make the correct diagnosis 99 percent of the time (in Owen’s study the percentage was found to be 83), some 200 “vegetative” Americans may be conscious, cases where “trapped” may in fact be a more accurate description.
But those who immediately think of the most publicized case–that of Terri Schiavo, whose family had an extremely public dispute over whether to continue care–should know that Owen warns that much more research with greater sample sizes is needed before any broad conclusions can be made. In addition, he and other experts point out that this research does not apply to worse brain trauma cases than those they studied, such as the severe oxygen depletion that resulted when Schiavo’s heart stopped.
Still, Schiavo’s brother Bobby Schindler tells the Washington Post that the study demonstrates the limits of medicine in providing accurate diagnoses: “I wish this could have been used on my sister to see what could have been done to help her.”
One can’t help but feel for Schindler, and yet he is off the mark when he says this study demonstrates the limits of medicine; more specifically, it demonstrates the limits of humans in making bedside diagnoses based on outward signs, but it also highlights the progress of increasingly sophisticated brain scanners in helping us see what is actually going on inside our brains.
Additional research could begin to explain the great mysteries of human consciousness, not to mention allow doctors to communicate with those patients who demonstrate brain activity, as may have happened recently–also in Belgium. But how certain will we need to be that these patients are conscious enough to make such profound decisions as whether they want to stop their own care?
“If a patient wanted to die, could they explain themselves adequately?” asks Joseph Fins, chief of the division of medical ethics at the Weill Cornell Medical College. “If they say ‘yes,’ what does that mean? If this person said ‘yes’ but meant ‘maybe’ or it was ’sort of yes,’ we may not be able to understand that sort of nuance. You have to be very careful.”
The possibilities and consequences of this research will likely result in a range of questions that are certain to weigh heavily on caregivers and family members in the wake of brain injuries and illnesses.
In the meantime, one might consider having another look at one’s will.
Australian diagnostics company HealthLinx Limited, along with researchers at the University of Liverpool, have just gotten word from the journal Clinical Science that their manuscript detailing the identification of a novel biomarker in ovarian cancer patients has been accepted for publication.
This means the company is now cleared to reveal the biomarker: anterior gradient protein 2 (AGR2). HealthLinx says its performance will be further tested in a forthcoming international biomarker study led by the company. Based on early data, however, this biomarker could increase the performance of the company’s OvPlex diagnostic test to greater than 97 percent accuracy.
Here is the paper abstract:
Ovarian cancer is often asymptomatic and is diagnosed at an advanced stage with poor survival rates, thus, there is an urgent need to develop biomarkers for earlier detection of ovarian cancer. Here, we demonstrate for the first time that the previously-reported metastasis-inducing protein, anterior gradient protein 2 (AGR2), can be detected in the blood of ovarian cancer patients. Using a newly developed ELISA test, we show significantly increased concentrations of AGR2 protein in plasma from cancer patients relative to normal controls. Plasma AGR2 concentrations were highest in stage II and stage III ovarian cancer patients and were similarly elevated in patients with both serous and non-serous tumors. The identification of elevated plasma concentrations of AGR2 may provide a useful biomarker to aid in the discrimination of normal and ovarian cancer patients particularly when used in combination with CA125.
Ovarian cancer is a form of cancer that starts in the ovaries–the female reproductive organs that produce eggs–but that tends to exhibit scant, vague symptoms such as bloating and feeling full quickly. Treatment in any stage tends to involve some level of surgery to remove the cancerous cells, including total hysterectomies.
The discovery of this biomarker–what could be a real coup for ovarian cancer patients worldwide–is described by HealthLinx as a coup for, well, HealthLinx. In the words of managing and executive director Nick Gatsios:
This is a coup for the company. HealthLinx has a patent pending for what we view as a unique antibody that allows us to detect the protein in human blood. We have been working with this biomarker for almost two years and have been holding our cards very close to our chest until we were confident about its importance in our programs.
Clinical Science will publish the paper, called “Increased plasma concentrations of anterior gradient 2 protein are positively associated with ovarian cancer,” in the forthcoming months, while a pre-print version is currently available online here.
Geologists appear to have stumbled upon a meteorite-hit site in western Rajasthan after they discovered quartz-like mineral that is similar to the one found near the famous Lonar crater lake in Maharashtra. The experts from the Indian Institute of Technology- Bombay detected occurrence of stishovite mineral in magnetic particles found in MokalsarSiwana way of the Siwana volcanic province in western Rajasthan.
“Such magnetic spherules, with 57 per cent of magnetite and 37 per cent haematite and with insignificant rare earth element (REE) content have been reported recently from a wide variety of geological formations and Recent Alluvium,” Prof D Chandrashekhram of IIT-Bombay told PTI over phone. The stishovite discovered in the Siwana volcanic province of western Rajasthan is somewhat similar to the Lonar crater and formed by a series of meteor or asteroid impact, he said.
The structure has huge rings which the experts say makes it geologically unusual in the terrains of Rajasthan. “There is a huge ring structure in the stishovite which we call the Siwana rings and has been formed due to meteoric impact,” he said.
These Siwana rings are “unique” in terms of geographic location, geological relations in the vicinity of the structure, distinctive shape and surface sculptures, Chandrashekaram said.
A new website dedicated to making non-personal data held by the U.K. government available for software developers has launched today with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Data.gov.uk is being slammed with traffic but six months after the U.S. government opened its Data.gov site the U.K. site already has more than three times as much data than the U.S. site offers today.
At launch, Data.gov.uk has nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. The U.S. site, Data.gov, has less than 1,000 data sets today.
The UK government has been a big supporter of innovation built on top of public data. It sponsored a contest called Show Us a Better Way, giving cash prizes to people who came up with the best ideas for mashups they would like to create if they had access to the right government data. Charles Arthur at the Guardian has good coverage of the U.K.’s open data work (the Guardian has been working hard to open public data as well).
The U.S. government, on the other hand, has been lackluster in its move to open data to facilitate outside innovation. If Twitter is the poster child for building a thriving ecosystem around a streaming set of data, then the Obama administration has earned about 140 characters worth of praise for its fledgling efforts so far. The U.S. government’s efforts to advance agencies’ use of cloud computing may work in conjunction with opening data to the public and thus may improve the state of things, but time will tell.
Congress didn’t even ask U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra any questions about President Obama’s Open Government initiative during his confirmation hearings. When the U.S. government’s Data.gov site launched, critics pointed out that it was filled with relatively non-controversial data sets; plenty of USGS data but no DOJ or military data, for example. The U.K.’s data site, in contrast, includes 22 military data sets at launch, including one called Suicide and Open Verdict Deaths in the U.K. Regular Armed Forces.
One request that users of both sites still have is for data to be made available in standardized formats. The U.K. site does include a prominent promotion of the Semantic Web, no doubt a tribute to Berners-Lee’s focus on the paradigm as the next step for the future of the web. More standardized, structured data is expected to be the direction that the program tries to get government agencies to move toward in the future.
Though the debut of Apple’s mythical tablet at the company’s invitation-only special event next week and the rapture with which it will inevitably be met obviate the need for a closing “one more thing” announcement, Apple (AAPL) may deliver one anyway. Three, actually.
iPhone OS 4.0. And the iPhone 4G–on Verizon (VZ).
That’s the word from Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek, who believes there’s “a good chance” we’ll hear about all three come next Wednesday.
“Together with our semi-conductor partners, we have ascertained that there is a reasonable chance the Asian supply chain is prepping for mass production of a new iPhone in March, for availability in late Q2, likely June,” Misek wrote in a note to clients today.
“The phone will be carried on Verizon and hence will operate on the CDMA network,” he asserts, adding, “however, it will also support European GSM and HSPA standards. An updated 4GS version that will support LTE is anticipated to arrive in June 2011.”
As to the cost, the analyst expects change. “At this moment, we have not heard about the pricing of the device, but believe it will be different from what it is at the moment. While we remain of the view that tiered data plans are imminent, our checks indicate the new iPhone from Verizon will still come with an unlimited data plan.”
Now, I have no idea how much credence to give speculation like this, nor do I have any insider insight into Apple’s carrier negotiations. But I will say this: It seems unlikely that Apple will announce a new iPhone and carrier partnership right after unveiling a brand new, and presumably revolutionary, product.
It might do so before, though. After all, the debut of the iPhone at Macworld 2007 was prefaced by the announcement of Apple TV.
Based on the level of innovative activity in the 3-D space, it appears we may soon be watching 3-D commercials on our flat-screen televisions and paging through 3-D memories of our children in photo albums.
While the blockbuster hits from the likes of Pixar and DreamWorks have commanded the most attention for 3-D in the popular press, the real hot spots of three dimensional technology innovation are in television and photography, which have both seen sharp increases in patenting activity over the last five years.
Three-dimensional television innovation activity outranks any other innovation in this area, showing the greatest increase, up 69% from 2003 to 2008 (612 unique inventions as compared to 1034 unique inventions). Activity in photography and cinema also show noteworthy increases, up 57% and 45%, respectively.
Of the 1,034 unique inventions filed in 2008 in this area, approximately 4% were filed by Samsung; and about 2% by Panasonic and Toshiba, respectively. Others in the list of top 10 assignees include Seiko Epson, Electronics & Telecom Res Inst, Fuji Film Co, Intel, Philips Electronics, Sharp and the University of Zhejiang. So far in the first half of 2009, 486 unique inventions have been filed in this space.
In terms of regional pockets where patent protection is being sought most frequently for these technologies, the US leads, followed by Japan and China. A look at patent priority countries in the three-dimensional-television space, that is where the invention was first filed, shows the top patenting. Countries/authorities to be: US (347); Japan (246); China (159); Korea (140); Germany (23); Great Britain (20); WIPO (20); Taiwan (18); Europe (17); and France (16).
Nanorobotics is the technology of creating machines or robots at or close to the scale of a nanometer (10-9 metres). Recent advancements have proved that nanorobotics would be useful from Automotive industry to Drug delivery industry and can be a major breakthrough in science and technology.
A recent white paper on Patent Insights-Nanorobotics by Hadron Analytics states that the original brick of Nanorobotics was laid in 1885. The paper showed some more facts like the assignees wise activity, yearwise activity and IPC wise activity.
o Until 2001 companies are not active in the area as they were not aware of the advancements in the technology. (Now it is perceived as one of the future technologies)
o During global recession in 2009 activity deceased.
o After 2001 patenting activity increased almost exponentially.
Download white paper
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