U.S. Patent No. 7,850,975, issued on December 14, 2010 to Altermune Technologies, LLC of Corona del Mar, CA, discloses a method of immediately immunizing a human or animal against a specific pathogen.
Conventional active immunization of a subject involves exposing the subject to a specific immunogen or antigen (related to the pathogen to be immunized against) in order to provoke the subject’s immune system to respond by producing antibodies to counter the pathogen. As described by the ’975 patent, it can take weeks to months for the immune response to occur, and maintaining the immune response sometimes requires that a booster shot of the antigen be given weeks or months after the initial injection. As a result, conventional immunization is not useful for immediate treatment.
The ’975 patent discloses a method for immediately immunizing a subject against a specific pathogen using a “immunity linker molecule” that has (i) a first binding site that binds to an antibody produced by a previous immunization, and (ii) a second binding site that binds to the target pathogen. According to the ’975 patent, once a subject has already been immunized against one antigen, the subject “can be immediately immunized against a chosen antigen simply by administering … the immunity linker molecule with the appropriate second binding site.” I picture the process as the “immunity linker molecule” serving as an adapter that fits onto the existing antibody so that it can bind with a different pathogen. Such an immediate immunization would be helpful in various contexts, as described by the ’975 patent, for example, soldiers can be pre-immunized against a first molecule, and then if exposed to a second pathogenic molecule (e.g., anthrax), the appropriate immunity linker molecule can be administered, thereby immediately protecting the soldiers against the second pathogen.
I’m no stranger to inventors making fantastic claims regarding their inventions. As a patent attorney with a Ph.D. in physics, I’ve had my share of initial meetings with inventors that have purportedly found a way around one or more of the laws of thermodynamics (there usually isn’t a second meeting). But as amazing as the claims of the ’975 patent are, they may warrant the benefit of the doubt, because the sole inventor of the ’975 patent is Kary Mullis, co-winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Dr. Mullis was awarded the Nobel Prize for his development of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, now used in medical and biological research on DNA, as well as in forensic science and other fields in which genetic identification is performed. Dr. Mullis has a reputation for expressing non-conventional ideas in other fields, such as climate change, AIDS, and astrology. With regard to immunology and Altermune (the company that owns the ’975 patent), he states that the company represents:
a distinct change in direction for the medical treatment of microbial infections, metabolic disorders, cancer, any number of problems where surgical procedures are too crude, present chemical interventions are losing out to resistant strains, and yet some kind of molecular intervention is necessary and still makes sense.
The ’975 patent has had a long history at the USPTO. In 1999, Dr. Mullis filed a U.S. provisional application describing the invention, and followed up with filing a PCT application in 2000 which entered the national phase in the U.S. in 2002. After three office actions by the USPTO (which included rejections based on insufficient disclosure; see my earlier discussion of such “enablement” rejections), Altermune filed a U.S. continuation application in 2006. Five office actions later, Altermune received a Notice of Allowance in 2010. In the meantime, two continuation-in-part applications were issued to Altermune as U.S. Pat. No. 7,422,746 and U.S. Pat. No. 7,645,743 covering similar inventions. According to the USPTO database, Altermune owns three U.S. patents: the ’975, ’746, and ’743 patents.