Defined by Its Recipe A Copper Complex Claimed Through the Exact Process That Makes It

This application is about a copper compound used to damp down inflammation in tissue, most often skin. What makes the claim unusual is that the active ingredient is not described by a chemical formula at all. It is described by the process used to make it: solid copper of a specified surface area, a solid chelating agent, and an oxidising agent added while the two are in contact. The applicant is RR Medsciences Pty Ltd, a Sydney biotechnology company, and the sole named inventor is its founder. This is an Australian divisional of an earlier Australian filing.

The Problem

The specification builds its case from oxidative stress. Skin is constantly exposed to ultraviolet light, drugs, alcohol, poor nutrition and physical and psychological stress, all of which drive the production of reactive oxygen species. Those species damage proteins, lipids and DNA, and they also switch on the redox-sensitive transcription factors that produce inflammation. The specification treats inflammation and oxidative stress as two views of the same process rather than as separate problems.

On the treatment side it is blunt. Current anti-inflammatory drugs, meaning corticosteroids and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, are described as not overly effective at managing inflammatory responses. Wound healing gets a longer treatment, with roughly fifteen per cent of older adults living with chronic, hard to heal wounds. Topical growth factors looked promising, but only platelet-derived growth factor reached approval for diabetic foot ulcers, cost has kept it from being a general solution, and a wound bed is in any case full of proteolytic enzymes that degrade an applied protein before it can work.

That leads to the specific gap the invention aims at. Superoxide dismutase is the enzyme the body uses to neutralise the superoxide radical, and it is a powerful anti-inflammatory in its own right because it stops the redox signalling that triggers inflammation. It was proposed decades ago as a treatment for wound healing and acne and never got there, for reasons the specification lists: the enzyme is large, it does not cross into cells well, it has a short half life, it can provoke an immune response, and it is expensive to make. A small, stable, cheap molecule doing the same chemical job would sidestep all five objections at once.

What This Invention Does

Claim 1 is a method of reducing an inflammatory response in a subject. The step is administering a composition containing a copper ion complex, or a mixture of them, and the complex is identified entirely by how it is produced. Step (a) is contacting copper having a specific surface area of about 0.1 to 2 square metres per kilogram, or particles with a bulk density between about 0.2 and 8.0 grams per cubic centimetre, with a chelating agent in solid form. Step (b) is contacting that copper and chelating agent with an oxidising agent while the two are still in contact with each other. The claim closes with the purpose: to thereby reduce the inflammatory response in the subject.

Every constraint in that recipe is doing work. The copper must be a solid with a defined available surface area, which in practice means turnings, wire, granules or powder rather than a dissolved salt. The chelating agent must be solid too, and the specification is explicit that this is deliberate: dissolving it first, it says, produces a different mixture of copper ion complexes. The preferred chelating agent, set out in claim 21, is EDTA or one of its salts, and the preferred oxidising agent is hydrogen peroxide.

The product of that recipe is called RM191A in the worked examples, and the specification describes it as containing copper in two oxidation states, a Cu2+ and Cu3+ pairing. Its central claim about the material is a measurement rather than a theory. Using a nitroblue tetrazolium assay run at a pH where the complex is stable, the inventors compared it against bovine superoxide dismutase and report that at 20 micromolar it neutralised superoxide radicals ten times more effectively than the enzyme, with the gap widening at higher concentrations.

The remaining claims fan out from there, into wound treatment, chronic and diabetic ulcers, DNA damage from ultraviolet and gamma radiation, sunburn and burns, with the burn claims specifying administration within minutes of the injury. Claim 17 adds hyaluronic acid, which the examples use as the gel base, and claim 18 lists gel, cream, spray, hydrogel and ointment among the formulations. A second block from claim 23 onwards restates the same methods with the complex defined structurally instead, as copper coordinated to a ligand of one of three drawn formulas, and adds a cosmetic composition claim, dressing and bandage claims, and a claim to inflammatory skin conditions including psoriasis and venous dermatitis. In the reported examples, a mouse ear oedema model showed an eighty three per cent reduction in ear weight against a placebo gel, and a full thickness wound model reached ninety three per cent skin regeneration at twelve days against seventy seven per cent for gel alone.

Key Features

• A product-by-process active ingredient. Claim 1 defines the copper complex by the steps used to make it, so anyone reproducing the recipe reproduces the claim regardless of what the molecule turns out to be.
• Solid chelating agent, not solution. The specification states that keeping the chelating agent solid produces a different mixture of complexes than dissolving it first, which is why that limitation sits in claim 1.
• An enzyme mimic rather than an enzyme. The reported scavenging activity is ten to thirty times that of bovine superoxide dismutase, without the size, stability and cost problems that stopped the enzyme being developed.
• Two parallel claim sets. The same methods are claimed twice, once by process and once by drawn ligand structure, so a challenge to one definition does not take out the other.
• Formulation and delivery are claimed. Gels, creams, sprays, hydrogels, ointments and impregnated dressings and bandages are covered, along with a cosmetic composition for reducing ultraviolet damage.

Who Is Behind It

The applicant is RR MedSciences Pty Ltd, an Australian company based in Chatswood in Sydney that develops treatments for skeletal, neuropathic and inflammatory pain. The sole named inventor is its founder, Llewellyn Stephen Frank Casbolt.

The compound has an existing published record. The skin work described here was also published as a peer reviewed paper, Skin protective and regenerative effects of RM191A, a novel superoxide dismutase mimetic, and it has since been taken into human testing for pain, with a randomised placebo-controlled crossover pilot study in chronic peripheral neuropathic pain published in 2026. It has not been approved as a medicine, and nothing in this application says otherwise.

The chain is entirely Australian at the start. The work was first filed as Australian provisional application 2019900251 on 28 January 2019, taken international as PCT/AU2020/050053 and published as WO 2020/154762. That became AU 2020215661, and the present application is a divisional of it. The priority country is Australia.

Why It Matters

The interesting part of this filing is the drafting choice rather than the chemistry. Defining an active ingredient by its manufacturing process is what an applicant does when the product is a mixture rather than a single pure substance, or when its exact structure is hard to pin down. It has a real advantage, in that a competitor cannot avoid the claim by arguing about which isomer or oxidation state is present, and a real cost, in that the claim only reaches material actually made that way. The second, structurally defined claim set suggests the applicant is hedging between the two.

Copper as a topical anti-inflammatory sits in an awkward commercial space between medicine and cosmetics, and the claim set reflects that. Alongside method of treatment claims for wounds, burns and ulcers there is a cosmetic composition claim for reducing ultraviolet skin damage, and one of the IPC codes assigned to the application, A61Q 17/04, is the classification for sunscreen preparations. A company can reach a consumer skincare market years before a therapeutic one, and the claims are written so both routes stay open.

The wider argument runs against the direction of the field. Anti-inflammatory drug development has been dominated for two decades by biologics aimed at specific signalling molecules. This application argues from the other end, that a small, cheap, stable inorganic complex removing the radical upstream of that signalling can do useful work in tissue biologics cannot easily reach. Whether it holds will be settled in clinical trials, not in a patent office.

Related Concepts

• Superoxide dismutase – the natural enzyme this complex imitates, and whose shortcomings the specification is built around.
• Copper in health – the biological background to using a copper species as a therapeutic rather than a nutrient.
• Topical medication – the delivery route the claims are almost entirely built around.
• Wound healing – the process the mouse and human skin experiments in the specification are measuring.

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AU 2026202124 was published in the Australian Official Journal of Patents on 9 April 2026 and is open for public inspection. Patent applications represent inventions that are sought to be protected and do not necessarily reflect commercially available products.