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Valter D. Longo and Chia-Wei Cheng are the "inventors". This is a blatant attempt at taking advantage of the indifference of the uspo and the ignorance of the p

• iplaw 10y ago
  This post shows that you, too, are a member of "the public" which is ignorant "to what is going on at the uspo." It's the USPTO, by the way. Can anyone find out who they are? Of course you can. You can find the examiner who reviewed this patent, you can find the references cited in the rejection, which precipitated the amendments to the claims. You can even find his phone number and email address. I wonder if there is any form of moral hazard in the uspo office, possibly in the form of workers being incentivized to issue patents They are incentivized to reject applications multiple times, to force an RCE, etc. via a point-based performance metric. Prosecuting a patent is not a walk in the park. Rejections get you points. Allowances do not get you points. Maybe offices or workers are granting patents for the sake of being able to show a high number of patents issued at the end of the year. This shot in the dark is totally baseless, and incorrect. I do know that something needs to change, a change that hopefully adds transparency and holds people responsible. How transparent do you want it? Do you want every office action made public? Do you want all communication between the examiner and the applicant to be made public? Do you want all responses to the rejections and references asserted as prior art for purposes of anticipation (novelty) or obviousness (inventive step) to be listed out for the entire world to see? OH WAIT. IT ALREADY IS.
  • wutusmuck 10y ago
    > This post shows that you, too, are a member of "the public" which is ignorant "to what is going on at the uspo." It's the USPTO, by the way. Thanks for ignoring the qualifier I used, how convenient for your own accusation. > You can even find his phone number and email address. Glad to hear this, but after a quick glance at the document I still cant find it. I'll try again. > They are incentivized to reject applications multiple times How? A source would be nice but the explanation will suffice. > This shot in the dark is totally baseless, and incorrect Could be incorrect, therefor the qualifier, again... >OH WAIT. IT ALREADY IS Where? Thanks for correctly informing another citizen. Your civility was much appreciated. Also, I would like to reiterate my call for responsibility. Although you said the examiners and applicants all known, I still dont think they are held accountable enough for the bad patents that get issued.
• rosspackard 10y ago
  I think you are mixing up 'Patent application' vs 'Patent'. Anyone can submit a patent application. Whether it makes it through and is granted is a different story. Also the title and abstract of the invention don't really mean much. The claims are what defines the patentable invention.
• reasonattlm 10y ago
  This is a fair explanation of what is going on here under the hood. The innovation here has to do with how to get funding into an area that Big Pharma has ignored. ------------ One of the more recent innovations in calorie restriction research has nothing to do with the science, and everything to do with figuring out how to pull more funding into the field. There is never enough funding for research in any field: going by how funds flow through our societies, it is easy to say that to a first approximation no-one really cares about progress in medicine. Bread and circuses, yes. Better technologies, better understanding of biology, and less disease, no. There is also a large difference between the funds available for non-commercial research versus money available and interested in investment in for-profit ventures. The latter is at least ten times the former, and much more easily arranged as well. Writing grants and raising philanthropic funding is a considerably harder job than pitching angels and venture firms; more effort for fewer dollars at the end of the day. But without the funding for non-profit research initiatives, there will be no new technologies ready to be carried forward in for-profit companies. It is one of the great frustrations of patient advocacy to know that the owners of countless millions of dollars are sitting on their hands, waiting for viable biotech companies, while the important research projects that will generate those companies struggle to raise hundreds of thousands to sustain shoestring budgets. Calorie restriction is a particular challenge in this context. It is a lifestyle choice, not a drug or an antibody or something else that the medical industry understands how to package, market, and sell. It is nothing more than eating sensibly and eating less. Anyone can choose to do it. It is free and straightforward and well-documented. Yet the effects on long-term health and aging in ordinary individuals are much larger than anything that can be generated by the presently available panoply of drugs and other interventions. That, I should say, is more a statement on the poor quality of present medicine when it comes to treating aging as a medical condition than it is on the benefits of calorie restriction. It is a case of something being better than nothing: no presently available medicine deliberately addresses the root causes of aging, for all that the first therapies that will do that are in development at various stages. The nature of calorie restriction means that there has been little to no for-profit investment aiming to better characterize its benefits. Rather, all that funding was directed towards mapping the biochemistry and haphazardly testing the established drug libraries to find something that triggered any of the same effects. The search for such calorie restriction mimetics is well documented elsewhere, so I won't dwell on that, beyond noting that the outcome of ten to fifteen years of work and a great deal of money is, so far, nothing of any practical use. So to calorie restriction itself, and how to obtain for-profit funding for research into eating less, and eating less in an effective way. The innovators here are Valter Longo and colleagues, who have achieved the goal of pulling in for-profit funding on the backs of turning specific implementations of fasting and low-calorie diets into FDA-approved therapies, such as an adjuvant in cancer treatment. The magic of regulation means that companies can manufacture a medical diet on the basis of research, and then use the barriers set up via intellectual property and regulatory pronouncements to charge an inordinate amount for what is, basically, a little bit of food that anyone could throw together after reading the papers to obtain the target calories, protein, micronutrient levels, and so on. That in turn means that the principals of these companies are willing to pay for the supporting research. On the one hand it's a depressing example of the distorted priorities that emerge from regulation of medicine, on the other one feels a certain admiration for Longo et al for having successfully hacked the system to fund the useful results they have produced these past few years. Quantifying the degree to which fasting alters the immune system, and quantifying the degree to which low-calorie diets and fasting are effectively equivalent in altering metabolism, are both helpful new information for those who practice forms of calorie restriction and intermittent fasting. In any case, here is a pointer to the less useful outcome from all of this, which is to say the medical diet. It comes across as a bad parody of itself, but that seems fairly true of most medical diet products - you can go look at ProLon yourself.