A USP­TO le­gal ad­vis­er is off con­tro­ver­sial Gilead HIV case af­ter ac­tivists al­lege tweets show bias

Last week, a top le­gal ad­vis­er in the US Patent and Trade­mark Of­fice work­ing on the high-pro­file Gilead HIV PrEP case tweet­ed at Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) “What proof????” and then at ac­tivists “Do facts even mat­ter to you?”

Now, STAT re­ports, she’s off of the case.

Ac­tivists in the coali­tion PrEP4All filed a pe­ti­tion to the USP­TO on De­cem­ber 9 ask­ing long­time se­nior le­gal ad­vi­sor Mary Till be re­moved from the Gilead case, say­ing her tweets showed a bias to­ward Gilead. PrEP4All re­quest­ed ear­li­er this month the agency re­ject Gilead’s three-year patent ex­ten­sion for TAF (teno­fovir alafe­namide), a com­po­nent of one of the HIV pre­ven­tion reg­i­mens of­ten re­ferred to as PrEP. They al­lege the phar­ma gi­ant de­layed de­vel­op­ing the drug in or­der to “game” the sys­tem and hold off gener­ics.

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