Amarin Corp Plc (AMRN)

[breathofthenightwind]

Yes, North is right. The analysis a court does when reviewing claims for obviousness has very little to do with the way a peer reviewed journal article is analyzed, or how the FDA looks at drug applications.

For patent claims to be obvious, all that must be shown is that the invention claimed was (a) suggested by the prior art and that the prior art provided (b) a reasonable expectation of success. Under the right circumstances, both (a) and (b) can be found by a showing that falls far short of what is required to support a peer reviewed scientific article or an NDA. For example, the suggestion can be a mere sentence of two, buried in a much longer publication, with no data of any kind to support that suggestion.