Appeal No. 1997-3275
Application No. 07/963,329
invention would not have permitted one skilled in this art to practice the invention without
undue experimentation. Therefore, the rejection of claim 1 under 35 U.S.C. § 112, first
paragraph, is reversed.
The Prior Art rejections
The appealed claim stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as being obvious over
the combined teachings of Fryklund, Sara, Fellows, Hansson, Ocrant, Leeson, and Fingl.
The examiner relies on Fryklund, Sara, Fellows, Hansson as teaching (Answer,
page 8) "the important role of IGF-1 in stimulating various types of neurons in vivo and
in vitro, to promote their regeneration, growth, differentiation, and survival." The examiner
acknowledges that the teachings of these references differ from the claimed invention in
that they (id.) "do not teach the use of IGF-1 to promote survival of
photoreceptor cells in particular." However, the examiner relies on Ocrant as teaching
(Answer, paragraph bridging pages 8-9):
that IGF-I and IGF-II (i.e., IGF-1 and IGF-2) are polypeptide
mitogens which are structurally homologous to insulin, are
produced in the central nervous systems (CNS) of both adult
and fetal animals, participate in growth and differentiation of
fetal CNS, participate in the regulation of growth hormone
secretion and satiety, are found in the vitreous humor of the
eye, and act by binding to specific receptors (e.g., abstract
and p. 2407, cols. 1 and 2). Ocrant et al. also teach the use of
radiolabeled, iodinated IGF-I (125I-IGF-I, p. 2408, col. 1) to
identify the distribution of IGF-I receptors in mammalian retina
(p. 2408, col. 2), in order to study the function of IGF-I in the
CNS (paragraph bridging pp. 2407-2408). Using tissue
sections of rat and bovine retina, the labeled IGF-I localized to
8
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