Dealing with Inventions Combining Software and Biotech

Some invention disclosures are difficult to categorize as either a biotech or software. Yet, inventions still need to be assigned to license managers, patent attorneys and patent examiners who won’t necessarily have technical expertise covering everything from artificial intelligence to antibody design. Often, a team approach is necessary to truly determine what is novel about an invention, and whether that novelty lies in a computer or biology field. Stephanie Vavra and the panel will discuss how they determine whether a disclosure is worthy of a patent application, how the staff work on the patent application and how it gets assigned to a patent examiner.