2001

European Patent Office limits Harvard's "oncomouse" patentMunich, 7 November 2001 — The EPO opposition division dealing with Harvard University's "oncomouse" patent has decided to maintain it in amended form. After a two-day hearing, the division ruled that the patent must be limited to transgenic rodents containing an additional cancer gene. This decision can be appealed by the patentee or any of the opponents.

"Oncomouse" opposition proceedings resume at EPOThe European Patent Office (EPO) has resumed opposition proceedings against Harvard University's "oncomouse" patent. The opposition division in Munich has invited the parties - Harvard University as the patent proprietor and 16 different groups, individuals, political parties and organisations wanting the patent revoked - to three days of oral proceedings, starting on 6 November.

A new programme of support for external research in applied econometrics, forecasting and survey methodsThis new research programme is announced in order to help the process of making capacity planning decisions at the European Patent Office (EPO). Researchers or teams of researchers, from Europe or elsewhere, are invited to submit proposals under the following five modules.

New record number of filings at the European Patent Office New filings record at the European Patent Office (EPO): In 2000, the Office received a total of 142 940 patent applications, 16% more than in the previous year. This means that annual filing figures have more than doubled in the last ten years, with an almost five-fold increase over the total anticipated when the Office was first set up. The accession of Turkey to the European Patent Convention (EPC) in November 2000 brought the number of member states of the European Patent Organisation up to 20.

Patent citation analysisThe following link provides a PDF version of the article "Patent citation analysis - A closer look at the basic input data from patent search reports", written by Jacques MICHEL and Bernd BETTELS, EPO DG 1, jointly published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht and Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest in Scientometrics, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2001) 185–201.