Company: KROS
Filing Date: 2025-08-06
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0001664710-25-000070
Chunk: 67

Company: Keros Therapeutics, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-08-06
Form: 10-Q
Item: Item 4
Chunk 67
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 stop the third party on the ground that such third party’s activities do not infringe our owned or in-licensed patents. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court has recently changed some legal principles that affect patent applications, granted patents and assessment of the eligibility or validity of these patents. As a consequence, issued patents may be found to contain invalid claims according to the newly revised eligibility and validity standards. Some of our owned or in-licensed patents may be subject to challenge and subsequent invalidation or significant narrowing of claim scope in proceedings before the USPTO, or during litigation, under the revised criteria which could also make it more difficult to obtain patents. 

We, or our licensing partners, may not be able to detect infringement against our owned or in-licensed patents, as the case may be, which may be especially difficult for manufacturing processes or formulation patents. Even if we or our licensing partners detect infringement by a third party of our owned or in-licensed patents, we or our licensing partners, as the case 

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may be, may choose not to pursue litigation against or settlement with the third party. If we, or our licensing partners, later sue such third party for patent infringement, the third party may have certain legal defenses available to it, which otherwise would not be available except for the delay between when the infringement was first detected and when the suit was brought. Such legal defenses may make it impossible for us or our licensing partners to enforce our owned or in-licensed patents, as the case may be, against such third party. 

If another party questions the patentability of any of our claims in our owned or in-licensed U.S. patents, the third-party can request that the USPTO review the patent claims such as in an inter partes review, ex parte re-exam or post-grant review proceedings. These proceedings are expensive and may result in a loss of scope of some claims or a loss of the entire patent. In addition to potential USPTO review proceedings, we may become a party to patent opposition proceedings in foreign patent offices, where either our owned or in-licensed foreign patents are challenged. 

In the future, we may be involved in similar proceedings challenging the patent rights of others, and the outcome of such proceedings is highly uncertain. An adverse determination in any such proceeding could reduce the scope of, or invalidate, our patent rights, allow third parties to commercialize our technology or products and compete directly with us, without payment to us, or result in our inability to manufacture or commercialize products