Trilateral Project 24.1-Biotechnology 188

Generally, when a partial amino acid sequence of a certain protein is publicly known, it is easily made by a person skilled in the art to clone the entire DNA sequence encoding the whole protein by using a DNA fragment encoding the partial amino acid sequence as a probe, because it is indicative of the current direction of technological development. Therefore, generally inventive step cannot be recognized in such a case, when there is a high probability to obtain (to clone) a whole DNA sequence which encodes protein X by obtaining the said probe encoding the partial amino acid sequence of Y.

However, when it is recognized that the cloning of the entire DNA sequence from the said probe is a difficult task, or when the effect achieved by a cloned specific DNA encoding protein X is either qualitatively different from that of prior art, or qualitatively superior, even if the quality is the same, and this effect cannot be expected by a person skilled in the art on the basis of the state of the art, then, inventive step is present.