A Medical Device Daily

Troll Busters (Mercer Island, Washington) said it has filed a Reexamination Brief with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a reexamination of all of the broad multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method claims of U.S. Patent 5,582,989 (the ’989 patent), titled “Multiplex Genomic DNA Amplification for Deletion Detection.”

The patent was originally filed by Baylor College of Medicine (Houston) and then exclusively licensed to Abbott Laboratories (Abbott Park, Illinois).

Troll Busters said its focus is on securing “freedom to operate against invalid and broad over-reaching patent claims, such as the ’989 patent.”

The organization “busts,” or invalidates, patents and claims perceived to be specious and over-reaching, so as to provide freedom to operate services for innovators, either individually or as an industry-wide cooperative effort.

Troll Busters said it provides its patent busting and freedom-to-operate services to what it describes as “victims of patent trolls” by providing multiple SNQs (substantial new questions of patentability) in each brief in order to not just fire upon offending patent claims, but to do so with “shock and awe.”