Hi ILT.
I don't know much (if anything) about patent law. But I kind of think that if you have a complicated technology platform, that is almost impossible for somebody else to replicate by either guesswork or trial and error, then you may decide not to patent it, or at least not all elements of it.
It's almost as if the process of patent application draws attention towards your trade secret. And why would you want to do that?
Having said that, NWBO clearly think, or at least tell us, that they have a valuable patent portfolio that protects their platform technology.
I think there are layers and layers to this. You might patent an ancillary process that is part and parcel of your platform, perhaps to do with manufacturing technique (maybe like the use of tangential flow filtration?).
So you break down the whole process into several proprietary elements, and maybe patent some of them.
In practice, I think it is so difficult for a potential competitor to directly replicate NWBO's work, that few would even attempt to do so. They would still have to invest the hundreds of millions to go through the laborious and lengthy process of pre-clinical work and then the whole round of clinical trials.
We've have seen other clinical trials involving dendritic cells that don't succeed in trials and so fall by the wayside.
Which allows me to say; "They just don't have the secret sauce!"
And that is in effect true.
The secret sauce is in the process, not so much the biological starting materials. 'The process is the product' is the often quoted phrase.
Not that I'm totally complacent. And an employee who leaves a BP company, joins NWBO, then leaves NWBO and goes back to original BP company, makes me raise an eyebrow and ask 'what was that all about?'
With the notable exception of Car-T, BP really don't seem to be interested in genuinely personalised treatments.
They want products that can be produced in super large batches at the lowest cost and with the highest profit margin.
And certainly to date, the Car-T's haven't produced the volumes or the margins that BP are interested in. So they won't be in a hurry to repeat the exercise with, for example, a DC immunotherapy.
At the end of the day, does patenting fully protect your proprietary technology? Almost certainly not. But all the other factors make it very difficult for anyone to readily create copycat treatments.
Obviously the granted market exclusivity that comes with approval doesn't last forever, and varies depending on jurisdiction. But with an off the shelf pill, somebody else can easily create a generic version, after the exclusivity period ends. But this is not a pill. It will never be easy to reproduce or replicate.
That is certainly the case for L. Perhaps slightly less so for Direct.
Sooner or later, there probably will be another effective DC immunotherapy, but I think there is very little chance of it arising from wholesale 'borrowing' of all of NWBO's proprietary knowledge.
JMO.
