Trilateral Project 24.1-Biotechnology 172

In general no, since it is well known in the art that many human pro-teins are encoded not only by a single gene but additionally by corresponding allelic genes and it is merely a common procedure for a person skilled in the art to isolate the DNA sequence encoding a human allelic mutant of an already known human protein. However, the DNA encoding an allelic mutant of the human protein might involve an inventive step if the applicant shows that his invention has a technical advantage of a surprising and unexpected kind.