Stem cell patent to reach Supreme Court

Jeanne Loring holds a petri dish with induced pluripotent stem cells from a Parkinsons patient.

The U.S. Supreme Court will be asked to intervene over a controversial embryonic stem cell patent, opponents of the patent said Thursday.

Jeanne Loring, a stem cell scientist at The Scripps Research Institute, said the court will be asked Friday to overturn a lower court decision and allow the opponents to seek cancellation of the patent held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF.

Loring and two public interest groups, Consumer Watchdog and the Public Patent Foundation, have been trying to get that patent overturned since 2006. Another patent giving rights over induced pluripotent stem cells has been waived by WARF.

Loring, who is researching the use of induced pluripotent stem cells to treat Parkinson's disease, said the remaining patent impedes development of embryonic stem cell therapies.

Embryonic stem cell therapies are reaching the clinical stage, such as San Diego's ViaCyte, which recently began trials of its therapy for Type 1 diabetes, derived from human embryonic stem cells.

"We think that now embryonic stem cells really are showing their worth in clinical studies, it's very important to just wipe this thing off the books, so nobody can either shut down trials or require huge licensing fees for successful efforts," Loring said.

The foundation got the patent for work by James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was the first to derive human embryonic stem cells, in 1998.

Opponents say Thomson's feat, while significant, was not a patent-worthy technological advance. Loring has said other qualified scientists could have isolated the cells with methods used for finding animal embryonic stem cells, so the advance was obvious.

Moreover, embryonic stem cells are a product of nature and therefore not patentable according to a 2012 Supreme Court ruling, they say.

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Stem cell patent to reach Supreme Court