Patents

A broad intellectual property portfolio of issued patents and pending patent applications supports our product development and out-licensing activities. We currently own or have licensed over 160 issued or allowed United States patents, 290 granted or accepted foreign patents and 415 patent applications that are pending around the world.

Our policy is to seek appropriate patent protection for inventions in our principal technology platforms - telomerase and human embryonic stem cells - as well as ancillary technologies that support these platforms or otherwise provide a competitive advantage to us. We achieve this by filing patent applications for discoveries made by our scientists, as well as those that we make in conjunction with our scientific collaborators and strategic partners. Typically, although not always, we file patent applications in the United States and internationally through the Patent Cooperation Treaty. In addition, where appropriate, we try to obtain licenses from other organizations to patent filings that may be useful in advancing our scientific and product development programs.

Our telomerase platform is the mainstay of our oncology program and it serves as the basis for other product opportunities. Our patent portfolio includes over 110 issued or allowed United States patents, 170 granted or accepted foreign patents and over 155 patent applications pending worldwide relating to our telomerase product opportunities. The foundational patents include those covering the cloned genes that encode the RNA component (hTR) and the catalytic protein component (hTERT) of human telomerase. Related issued and pending patents cover cells that are immortalized by expression of recombinant hTERT, cancer diagnostics based on detecting the expression of telomerase in cancer cells, the use of hTERT as a cancer vaccine, the use of the hTERT promoter to power cancer-killing genes and viruses, and telomerase inhibitors for use as cancer therapeutics. We own issued patents that cover the sequences of GRN163 and GRN163L, as well as patents covering the chemistry that is used to build these oligonucleotides. We have a license to the dendritic cell-loading technology used in our telomerase cancer vaccine. Recently filed patent applications covering the telomerase-activating compounds TAT1 and TAT2 that we discovered in collaboration with our colleagues at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have been exclusively licensed to our majority-owned subsidiary, TAT, for therapeutic applications.

Our human embryonic stem cell platform is protected by patents rights that we either own or have licensed. The patents that we have licensed include foundational hESC patents that arose from work that we funded at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We have also filed patent applications to protect technologies developed by our scientists in our ongoing efforts to develop products based on hESCs. By way of example, these patent applications cover technologies that we believe will facilitate the commercial-scale production of hESCs, such as methods for growing the cells without the need for cell feeder layers. Patent applications that we own or have licensed also cover cell types that can be made from hESCs, including hepatocytes (liver cells), cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells), neural cells (nerve cells, including dopaminergic neurons and oligodendrocytes), chondrocytes (cartilage cells), pancreatic islet β cells, osteoblasts (bone cells), hematopoietic cells (blood-forming cells) and dendritic cells. Currently our portfolio includes over 230 patent applications pending around the world covering various aspects of our stem cell technology. Examples of granted stem cell patents that we own include, U.S. Patent Nos. 6,458,589 and 6,506,574 relating to hESC-derived hepatocytes; 7,326,572 relating to hESC-derived islet cells; 6,800,480 relating to the feeder-free growth of hESCs; and 6,833,269 covering methods of producing neural cells from hESCs.

A third technology platform, nuclear transfer, is protected in part by the patent rights that we purchased in 1999 with the acquisition of the U.K. company Roslin Bio-Med, which we now operate as Geron Bio-Med. 18 United States patents have now issued or been allowed, and 48 foreign patents have been granted or accepted. In addition, we have more than 25 pending patent applications worldwide relating to nuclear transfer. As discussed above, these patent rights are now a major asset of Start Licensing, Inc., the joint venture company that we created in 2005 for the purpose of managing and licensing intellectual property rights for animal cloning.

We endeavor to monitor worldwide patent filings by third parties that are relevant to our business. Based on this monitoring, we may determine that an action is appropriate to protect our business interests. Such actions may include the filing of oppositions against the grant of a patent in overseas jurisdictions, and the filing of a request for the declaration of an interference with a U.S. patent application or issued patent. Similarly, third parties may take similar actions against our patents. By way of example, in 2005 we were involved in interference proceedings that we had initiated at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office involving patents and patent applications for nuclear transfer technology; judgments in those actions were entered in our favor. We are currently also involved in patent opposition proceedings before the European Patent Office, the Australian Patent Office and the New Zealand Patent Office, both as the party holding the opposed patent, and in opposition to patents granted or proposed to be granted to another entity.

Telomerase patents (link to PDF)

Embryonic stem cell patents (link to PDF)

Nuclear transfer patents (link to PDF)

Other patents (link to PDF)