I sat the paper under exam conditions in Munich as a bench marker to give the examination committees some materials for their marking discussion. If you want to try the paper yourself, here are the compendium copies in English, French & German.
The invention, a cell culture container (such as a multi-well plate) is something you could get in real-life to protect: the mechanical aspects need to be claimed, taking into account the chemical and biological aspects. This is a positive aspect of the current combined technologies format (this is the third year) – they prepares candidates who are specialised but have a broad understanding of the main issues when patenting other technical areas.
This is a nice mechanical paper for chemists to practice. The independent device claim emerges very quickly, but there are a lot of refinements for each feature to consider claiming. The mechanical paper issue of getting more than one embodiment under a single claim is included, but the flow of the information is steady and manageable. Very consistent wording used. The mechanical terminology (and understanding) is not difficult. There is a lot of work to do, but the paper does a good job of guiding you to your answer. Other people I talked to had similar comments, and the feeling was generally good.
See below for more details and possibly some spoilers.
I finished 10 minutes short of the 4 hours available
– I got 2 independent claims and a number of the dependent claims.
I did not have time to claim every refinement for each feature, so I concentrated on the main ones with an additional effect. I had 12 claims in total.
Leave a Reply