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Making Sense Of Antibody Epitope Claims
By Benjamin Pelletier, Haynes and Boone
The antibody therapeutics industry has mushroomed into a sector whose value is estimated to reach $138.6 billion by 2024.
1 And this astounding economic growth has been accompanied by equally astonishing technological advancement. Obtaining certain types of patent rights to antibodies has become increasingly challenging in the United States.
2 To comprehend this evolution, we must first take a careful look at what antibodies are, and then understand how they are claimed in a patent.
Antibodies And Patent Claims
An antibody is, at its core, a professional binding molecule, whose sole purpose is to bind to its epitope – the three-dimensional arrangement of molecules to which it is attracted under the laws of physics. Each peptide subunit of an antibody contains a stretch of amino acid residues that are highly variable from one antibody to the next (aptly named the “variable region”), which conta