This month, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Amgen Inc. v. Sanofi, the closely watched case involving the enablement standard for patent claims, particularly as applied to functionally defined genus claims. Genus claims are typically used in patents for biological, pharmaceutical, chemical technologies to cover an entire group of related chemicals, rather than one specific chemical.

The question raised by Amgen’s petition was whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s long-standing articulation of the enablement requirement — that the specification must enable those skilled in the art “to reach the full scope of claimed embodiments” without undue experimentation — exceeds the statutory requirement that the specification teach the skilled person to “make and use” the invention.

Originally Published in Westlaw Today, Republished with the Permission of Thomson Reuters.