Appeal No. 1996-2431
Application 08/008,186
Bajusz.” Examiner’s Answer, page 5. If we understand the examiner’s position correctly, it
is that it would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art to conjugate D-Mel,
rather than Chl, to the amino acid at position six of one of Channabasavaiah’s analogs (for
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example, [Dlys(Chlorambucil) ]-LRH)) to obtain a peptide with high affinity to cancer cells.
Appellants point out that D-Mel replaces the amino acid at position six of Bajusz’s
“highly potent alkylating analogues,” rather than being conjugated to it. Brief, page 12.
Nevertheless, the examiner maintains that:
[T]he findings of Channabasavaiah i.e., conjugating an alkylating agent to D-
Lys at position 6 results in high bioactivity coupled with the teachings of
Bajusz that the presence of an alkylating agent, Mel or Chl, at position six . . .
of the LHRH sequence, even in an unconjugated form, results in increase in
bioactivity would certainly motivate a person skilled in the art to make the
modification called for by the claims (Examiner’s Answer, page 10).
In our view, Bajusz’s observations are of little relevance in establishing a nexus
between conjugating an alkylating agent to position six of an LHRH analog and replacing
position six of the LHRH analog with the same (or a related) alkylating agent. As
discussed above, Bajusz teaches that replacing amino acid position six with D-Mel
produces highly potent alkylating analogs of LH-RH with high affinities for cancer cell
membrane receptors. On the other hand, the reference teaches that compounds
“prepared by linking Chl, as an N-Acyl moiety, to the complete amino acid sequence of
agonistic and antagonistic analogues . . . showed much lower potency than their
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