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Furnetics Unlimited Ltd. today welcomed the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s final rejection of the long-running human–animal chimera application championed by biologist Stuart Newman and activist Jeremy Rifkin, calling the outcome “the correct result reached by the wrong road.” The company applauds the collapse of the claims while arguing that they failed not because they were “too human,” but because they read squarely onto Furnetics’ proprietary hybridization platform and decades of prior art.

The application, first filed in 1997 and refiled in 2002, sought sweeping claims over embryos and organisms combining human and nonhuman cells across open-ended proportions. Its authors filed it, by their own account, hoping either to secure a patent that would freeze the field for twenty years or to provoke a rejection that would slam the door on chimera patents altogether. Last week the applicants let the office’s final rejection stand and declared victory. The USPTO’s rationale leaned in part on a seldom-invoked reading of the utility requirement: that claims broad enough to encompass a human being fall outside patentable subject matter, the so-called “too human” line.

Furnetics says it shares the applicants’ relief at the result, but not their diagnosis.

“We are glad these claims are dead. We simply disagree, respectfully but completely, about why they were always going to be. The office spent its energy on philosophy — on where a human ends and an animal begins. That was never the operative question. The operative question is far more ordinary: the claims describe methods and lineages that were not new, were not the applicants’, and were not enabling. Several of them describe our benchtop.”

— Dr. Miriam Askewe, Chief Scientific Officer, Furnetics, Inc.

According to the company, the rejected application’s core techniques, the staged combination of pluripotent cells across species lines, and the selection protocols used to stabilize the resulting lineages, are described by Furnetics’ own published and proprietary work predating the 1997 filing. The company points to its Chimeric Lineage Platform, elements of which it says were disclosed in trade literature and internal filings well before the application’s priority date, and to a family of foundational methods it characterises as unpatentable-to-others precisely because Furnetics itself already placed them in the field.

Furnetics was careful to distinguish its position from the applicants’ stated goals. Newman and Rifkin have long sought to discourage chimera research outright, which Furnetics asserts harms important scientific discovery and progress. The company frames its objection as narrowly procedural: it does not oppose chimera patents in principle, it opposes these claims, on the ground that they encroach on Furnetics’ own proprietary technology and prior art.

The company declined to specify which of the application’s dependent claims it believes map most directly onto its platform, citing ongoing review, but indicated it had prepared a prior-art submission it ultimately did not need to file once the office issued its own rejection.

“These claims were rightfully rejected. But let the record show whose bench they were describing.”

— Corwin Vale, General Counsel and Chief IP Officer, Furnetics, Inc.