Health Discovery Corporation Issues Update on Challenges to Intel SVM-RFE Patent

SAVANNAH, Ga.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Health Discovery Corporation (OTCBB: HDVY) has received notification from the United States Patent and Trademark Office that it intends to issue a re-examination certificate to Intel Corporation following completion of the re-examination of Intel’s Patent No. 7,685,077 entitled “Recursive Feature Eliminating Method Based on a Support Vector Machine.”

“storing the updated kernel data in the buffer to replace the [prior] kernel data.”

During the re-examination, the USPTO agreed with the Company’s assertions that the claims of the Intel patent read on the Company’s prior art, meaning that the Company’s earlier patents disclosed all elements of the Intel claims, rendering them unpatentable. In response to rejection of the Intel claims, Intel amended its original claims to include an additional step of “storing the updated kernel data in the buffer to replace the [prior] kernel data.” In the statement of reasons for patentability, the patent examiner explained that although the cited prior art computes modifications to the kernel data in intermediate computations, they do not disclose storing the data to replace the previous data. Based on this step alone, the patent examiner determined that the claims were patentable and should be certified as such.

The Company finds the examiner’s comments to be a clear indication of failure to observe the standards for patentability established under U.S. Patent Law. In particular, the identification of a step that is inherent in the operation of every computer as the basis for patentability evidences a lack of understanding by the examiner of one or both of basic computer operation and the duty of the Patent Office fully examine patent claims in view of the known prior art before deciding that a patent should be granted.

While disappointed with the examiner’s decision in the re-examination, the Company draws encouragement from the fact that the Patent Office agreed that all elements of the Company’s patented SVM-RFE method are present in the Intel claims. A fundamental principle of patent law is that the addition of one or more elements to a patented claim does not avoid infringement. In this case, Intel merely added a standard computer operation to the Company’s SVM-RFE method. Furthermore, possession of a patent on a series of steps does not avoid infringement of a patent covering a subset of those steps.

The completion of the current re-examination opens the door to moving forward with interference proceedings involving the application that was filed by the Company to provoke an interference with Intel. Initiation of the interference proceedings had been placed on hold by the Patent Office pending completion of the re-examination. The Company last week submitted a request to the Patent Office that the interference now be allowed to proceed.

An interference is an administrative proceeding within the Patent Office through which a determination is made of who is entitled to a patent when two parties make claims to the same invention. Under current U.S. Patent Law, the first person to invent an invention is entitled to a patent. An interference is commonly provoked by submitting a new continuation application with claims that were copied from an issued patent or published application. If the owner of the continuation application can show that they are entitled to an earlier priority date than the issued patent, then the party with the issued patent must provide persuasive evidence that they actually invented the claimed subject matter before the earlier priority date of the other party. In this case, the Company’s earliest application describing SVM-RFE was filed in March 2000. Intel’s application for SVM-RFE was filed in August 2005. The patent examiner who is examining the Company’s continuation application has agreed that the claims of the application are identical to those of the Intel patent and that they are, therefore interfering. As a result, the Company is confident that it will prevail and be declared the sole owner of the SVM-RFE method when its claims are compared side-by-side with Intel’s claims.

About Health Discovery Corporation

Health Discovery Corporation is a molecular diagnostics company that uses advanced mathematical techniques to analyze large amounts of data to uncover patterns that might otherwise be undetectable. It operates primarily in the emerging field of personalized medicine where such tools are critical to scientific discovery. Its primary business consists of licensing its intellectual property and developing its own product line of biomarker-based diagnostic tests that include human genes and genetic variations, as well as gene, protein, and metabolic expression differences and image analysis in digital pathology and radiology. For more information, see www.healthdiscoverycorp.com.

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