Appeal No. 95-4404
Application 07/913,121
There is no further mention of screening, or what that might entail, in the “STATEMENT OF
THE INVENTION” or anywhere else in the application. Certainly, there is no disclosure of
the specific steps recited in the present claims, nor is there any mention of drug resistant
reverse transcriptases. We are in agreement with the examiner that the present claims do
not enjoy written description in the parent application, and, therefore, are not entitled to the
earlier filing date of the parent under 35 U.S.C. § 120.
Having determined that Konig is available as prior art, we turn to the rejections of
claims 8-19 as obvious over Konig in combination with Urdea, Holmes and Goff.
Konig discloses a method for identifying inhibitors of reverse transcriptase. The
method comprises: hybridizing a heteropolymeric HIV-1 RNA template and a
complementary primer; incubating the template-primer pair with reverse transcriptase,
biotin- and digoxygenin-labeled substrate molecules and a candidate inhibitor. Any cDNA
synthesized is captured on a streptavidin-coated solid support and detected by
peroxidase-labeled anti-digoxygenin antibody, so Konig does not disclose hydrolysis of
the RNA template or detection of the cDNA using capture and/or labeled probes in a
sandwich hybridization assay. Urdea and Holmes are cited to show that it is conventional
to hydrolyze RNA in an RNA cDNA duplex with subsequent detection of the cDNA by
sandwich hybridization. With respect to claims 8-13, Konig further differs from the claimed
invention in not using the assay to detect drug resistant forms of reverse transcriptase.
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