A new paper co-written by a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign legal scholar who studies intellectual property protection for advanced biotechnologies advocates for a middle ground in patent claims involving antibodies, the backbone of modern bioscience.

Antibodies constitute a $145 billion annual market – an amount projected to almost double by 2026, which renders the patents covering them among the most valuable intellectual property in the patent system. But those patents are being struck down due to a recent shift by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit aimed at strengthening two areas of patent law – enablement and written description – that are ill-equipped to deal with the molecular complexity of antibodies, said Jacob S. Sherkow, a professor of law and an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois.

Sherkow’s co-author is Mark A. Lemley of Stanford Law School.

“Given the improvement of antibody science as well as the advancement of our understanding of just how genetically diverse antibodies are, the federal circuit’s dramatic shift in the law of antibody patenting just seems like a poor fit,” Sherkow said.

Read the full story at news.illinois.edu.