In an interesting turn of events, the Court of Appeals rendered the patent that the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk had on its synthetic human growth hormone (HGH) is not enforceable.
It seems that when the application was made for the patent, Novo included detailed information about using the LAP enzyme to produce human growth hormone. The way it was described in the application led anyone reading it to believe that this process had already successfully taken place. Yet, this was not the case and it would take months later for the scientists to produce human growth hormone using the DAP enzyme. Novo has subsequently filed a patent to create HGH using the DAP enzyme.
