In a significant announcement this February, Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. had put forth a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, challenging their reasonable expectation of success or RES, standard that is employed for judging the obviousness factor in Intellectual Property matters. This report comes according to the analysis carried out by attorneys at Womble Bond, as documented by Zachary Murphy, Ben Bourke and Alex Wharton in their article published on Law360 on May 6, 2024.
The challenge by Vanda Pharmaceuticals revolved around the contention that the application of the Amgen v. Sanofi case judgment creates an unnecessarily complex situation for drug developers. However, the U.S. Supreme Court appears to have remained unpersuaded by this rationale and dismissed Vanda Pharmaceuticals’ request for a review of the Federal Circuit’s RES standard.
Although the decision’s causes are not explicitly stated, it’s speculated that the court might have found the critical argument put forward by the company to be lacking in substance or without merit. Hence, it may have led to the refusal of the plea for revisiting the Federal Circuit’s standard for determining obviousness.
This adds another chapter to the on-going discussions and debates on the interpretations and implementations of the RES standard in determining obviousness in Intellectual Property legal matters.