IP Protections
Intellectual Property
Under the exclusive license agreement with Washington University (St. Louis, MO), we have obtained the property rights to their patent estate consisting of approximately 83 active and inactive patents and patents pending. The term of the agreement is tied to the life of the last patent to expire, which, given the fact that there are a number of patents pending, we expect to be approximately 20 years. We are currently developing and testing products using the Washington University patents rights in the bovine and equine areas and expect to develop products for a number of other species as well.
With respect to SurBred™ (open cow test), we entered into exclusive licensing agreements with the University of Idaho and the University of Wyoming in fall, 2001, for the manufacture, use, sale and distribution of the marker used in the test. We have titled the open cow “SurBred™" and titled the LH product “BoviPure LH™" and have applied for trademark protection. We have also filed patent applications for the open cow test as well as the bovine LH product, to protect the concept and methods of product use. Further, we have been amending Provisional Patent Applications with clinical and field trial results. We plan to continue and expand the patent protection of our products as opportunities present themselves.
During early 2006 our U.S. and international patent applications entitled “Methods and devices for diagnosis of appendicitis" was published by the United States Patent Office and the International Bureau of the World International Patent Organization and we also recently filed a further separate patent application seeking to expand its worldwide position of intellectual property protection associated with this technology.
We have not filed patents for all of our human diagnostic antigens, although we consider our protein purification process proprietary. This purification expertise, knowledge and processes are kept as trade secrets. We have filed for patent applications on a number of our technologies. As a matter of practice we file patents on technology and developments we believe can be suitably protected in this manner.
