Appeal No. 1999-1393 Application No. 08/242,344 because Birnbaumer teaches that, as was appreciated in the art, receptor agonists or antagonists which are candidate human therapeutics should be assayed with human receptor systems. The artisan would reasonably have expected a human homolog having structural and functional properties similar to GluR5-2 to exist because Puckett teaches that a gene family similar to the GluR gene family in rat will be present in humans; moreover, Puckett exemplifies one clone which exhibits “extreme conservation” of sequence compared to the most closely related rat cDNA. The artisan would reasonably have expected the properties of the human GluR5 gene product to be qualitatively the same as those observed for the rat receptor, including the ability to bind to and respond to kainate, as evidenced by Sommer [‘92]. The artisan would also have expected, however, that although qualitatively similar, such properties would likely not be identical because Birnbaumer teaches, as was known in the art, that species-specific variations in the quantitative pharmacological properties are to be expected when comparing homologous gene products. The artisan would have expected to find one or two cDNAs homologous to the rat GluR5-2 in a human cDNA library because of the recognized diploid nature of the human genome: the copies of the gene inherited from different parents could be identical or different. The artisan would have expected that each of the two alleles would be closely related to the rat cDNA. The routineer would have entertained a reasonable expectation of success in isolating and identifying the desired clone(s) because of Heinemann, Bettler [‘90], and Sommer [‘92] describe several characteristic properties of the receptor (sequence, tissue distribution, functional response in Xenopus and HEK cells, etc.). The practice of the assays disclosed by Heinemann would necessarily involve the assessment of binding between the candidate (ant)agonists and the receptor protein or would alternatively have involved the measurement of phenomena (e.g., potentiation of electrophysiological properties) which the artisan would have expected to correlate with such binding. The claimed invention would have been prima facie obvious as a whole at the time it was made. While the claims on appeal are drawn to “[a] method of assaying” it is obviously key to the examiner’s rejection that a cDNA encoding the EAA3a, 3b, 3c or 3d receptor must be first successfully isolated. Once isolated the cDNA is used to engineer a cell to express the receptor, and then the claimed method can be performed. 13Page: Previous 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 NextLast modified: November 3, 2007