MADISON, WI USA (January 6, 2023) Porta Sophia filed a third-party preissuance submission with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today for U.S. Pat. App. Ser. No. 17/734,102 entitled “Movement Disorders”, which is currently assigned to Mind Medicine, Inc. The submission consisted of seven prior art documents that are material to the patentability of all seven claims of the application.
Porta Sophia, a non-profit psychedelic prior art library, leverages the experience of legal and interdisciplinary academic scholars to promote an ethical psychedelic patenting landscape that preserves the integrity of the public domain. The organization curates and makes relevant historical documentation readily available for anyone wanting to explore the scope of psychedelic technologies, including patent examiners.
The '102 application was filed on May 1, 2022 and claims priority to a provisional application filed on May 4, 2021. It describes the application of a psychedelic to someone with a movement disorder to treat said movement disorder and return the individual to a “normal” state. The application broadly claims the use of psychedelics such as LSD and empathogens including MDMA to treat movement disorders ranging from tremors to Parkinson's disease. In addition to claiming psychedelics for directly treating undesired movements associated with the movement disorder itself, the application also claims treating movements affiliated with anxiety in someone with a movement disorder and undesired movements arising from side-effects of drugs used to treat movement disorders.
Prior art in the third-party preissuance submission included publications from peer reviewed journals, domestic and international patent documents, news articles, and posts on public online forums. This prior art included material sourced from less common outlets, including a brief news report published more than twenty years ago about a man who self-reported decreased Parkinson's symptoms after taking MDMA. This prior art anticipates claims in the '102 application. The full third-party submission documentation is available here.
United States patent law allows third parties to submit prior art and concise descriptions of their relevance to the USPTO. Documents submitted may be considered in the examination of that patent application. In addition, these submissions have a broad impact because applicants have a duty to disclose the prior art submitted against a single patent application for other relevant patent applications filed by the applicant.
Porta Sophia tracks and analyzes psychedelic patent applications globally. If an application improperly claims innovation of something known in the public domain and meets the standards of Porta Sophia's third party intervention evaluation criteria, the team assembles evidence against these invalid claims and contests them directly to the relevant patent office through third-party interventions.
Porta Sophia, meaning doorway to wisdom, is a non-profit psychedelic prior art library created to support good patents in the field of psychedelics. Based in Madison, Wisconsin USA, Porta Sophia identifies scientific, historical and cultural prior art in common and uncommon spaces and brings it together in one simple search tool for innovators and patent reviewers. The organization's mission is to protect the public domain, stimulate innovation, and support good patents to support the potential for psychedelic therapies to be available at scale to the people who need them.
Porta Sophia works to support equity in the psychedelic field. The organization facilitates community engagement through encouraging submissions of prior art from the public and organizing an interdisciplinary Archival Researcher Network (ARN) to ensure quality psychedelic prior art is readily available to patent applicants, examiners, and those interested in psychedelic research.
To learn more about Porta Sophia's patent and prior art workflow or get involved, visit www.portasophia.org.