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(1) For sufficiency of disclosure (Articles 100(b) and 83 EPC),
the Board has to be satisfied firstly that the patent
specification certainly puts the skilled person in possession of
at least one way of putting the claimed invention into practice,
and secondly that the skilled person can put the invention into
practice over the whole scope of the claim. If the Board is not
satisfied on the first point that one way exists, the second
point need not be considered (Point 2).
(2) If for an invention which goes against prevailing technical
opinion the patentee has failed to give even a single
reproducible example, sufficiency of disclosure cannot be
acknowledged. It would amount to undue burden for the cautious
and conservative skilled person to have to do research of his
own to establish whether the invention can be put into practice
in some circumstances, not specifically described in the patent,
when prevailing technical opinion suggests the outcome will be
failure (Points 3 to 5).
(3) If the patent contains only an example with a hypothetical
experimental protocol, if this example is to be relied on for
showing sufficiency, then the burden of proof lies on the
patentee to show that in practice this protocol works as stated.
Evidence that a variation of the protocol works is unlikely to
be enough (Points 9 to 11).
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