Patently entusdiastic

The impact of a patent on a company's stock price can vary from nil to significant. One example of the latter is investor reaction to the announcement last month that Aastrom Biosciences Inc. had been granted an additional patent for its stem cell technology. Wall Street rewarded the company with a $3 bump to $7.75.

A similar swing occurred in July, when the company announced several patents for other components of the technology. The November patent claims cover the cell culture chamber, while six other patents cover the system's biology, three claim additional aspects of the instrumentation and two claim high-efficiency gene transfer methods for future applications of the Cell Production System (CPS) to engineered cell populations...