What the start when a pH? A closer look at Hospira v Cubist and daptomycin micelles
The IPKat posted a report earlier this week of the case Hospira v Cubist , in which three patents belonging to Cubist were revoked by Mr Justice Carr. A kind reader commented expressing the opinion that the reasons for finding the third patent invalid seemed a little thin. This aspect of the judgment is actually very interesting and was rather glossed over in the earlier post, and so this Kat would like to revisit the topic to look at this one aspect in a little more detail. The patent EP2264047 (“the 047 patent”) relates to a method of purifying daptomycin by altering the pH to change the CMC - that is not "Case Management Conference" but "Critical Micelle Concentration" - the concentration at which a surfactant (in this case daptomycin) begins to form micelles (spheres in which the lyophilic end [attracted to the surrounding liquid] of the surfactant molecule lie on the surface of the sphere and the lyophobic end [little attraction to the surrounding liquid] po...