Appeal No. 2006-1517 Page 14
Application No. 09/976,423
Other Issue
This application is said to be “a continuation-in-part of co-pending U.S.
application serial number 09/613,887” (specification, page 1), which is the subject of
appeal number 2006-1560. The claims in that application are directed to a method,
rather than a kit, for perioperative screening. The examiner rejected the claims as
obvious in view of, among other references, Pharmacogenetics6 and AAS.7
AAS discloses that different alleles of the BChE gene affect patients’ reactions to
succinylcholine (page 139, left-hand column), that “careful DNA analysis is really the
only way to establish individual BChE genotypes” (page 140, right-hand column), that
“[w]e have been able to sequence the entire BCHE coding region and consider all the
possible structural mutations using PCR amplification” (id.), and that “anesthesiologists
need to keep up to date about” the application of molecular biology tests to BChE
variants (sentence bridging pages 140 and 141).
Pharmacogenetics discloses that cytochrome P4502D6 (CYP2D6) in involved in
mediating drug biotransformation (page 309), including the transformation of codeine to
its active form (page 317, left-hand column), and that by combining “rapid and specific
PCR-based allele-specific amplification tests . . . [with] XbaI RFLP analysis, about 95
percent of all mutant alleles of CYP2D6 could be identified, allowing for the prediction of
over 90 percent of PM [poor metabolizer] phenotypes” (page 314, right-hand column).
6 The reference is cited as “Pharmacogen[e]tics, Chapter 4, pp. 309-326” in the Information Disclosure
Statement received in application 09/613,887 on April 6, 2001 (reference number 202 in the IDS).
7 La Du, “Butyrylcholinesterase variants and the new methods of molecular biology,” Acta
Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica, Vol. 39, pp. 139-141 (1995)
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