Patenting Proteomics : Patentability and Scope of Protection of Three-Dimensional Protein Structure Claims under German, European and US law

Abstract

The Human Genome Project revealed that the human organism contains far fewer genes than proteins. The fact that approximately 33,000 genes encode more than 200,000 thousands proteins invalidated the long-held assumption that one gene encodes a single protein. Further studies demonstrated that even small structural variations in the