MADISON, WI USA (September 20, 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. 18/114,381 entitled “Psilocybin Composition”, which is currently assigned to Turtle Bear Holdings, LLC. The submission consisted of 10 prior art documents that are material to the patentability of 15 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.
Patent application: Treatment of depression with baeocystin, norbaeocystin, and psilocybin
The ’381 application was filed on February 27, 2023 and claims priority to a provisional application filed on July 23, 2016. It describes a method for reducing symptoms of depression by administering 0.1 to 10 mg dosage ranges of baeocystin, norbaeocystin, psilocybin and psilocin. The application also claims drug combinations with cannabinoids and salvia divinorum.
Prior art in the third-party preissuance submission included publications from peer reviewed journals, web pages, and U.S. patent documents. Notably, a 2013 Erowid blog post retrieved from web archives documented common psilocybin mushroom dosages. This prior art anticipates claims in the ’381 application. The full third-party submission documentation is available here.
Third-party submissions of prior art
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.
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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 assure psychedelic therapies can one day 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.