VIB and prior art: What really happened

Faced with enormous time pressure, the IP team came up with a simple yet brilliant idea: they decided to file the patent application not in Europe, but in Salt Lake City, Utah, 9 hours behind Belgium. Because the invention’s novelty must be assessed on a worldwide basis, this gave them an additional 9 hours to write and file the patent application. And it worked; the patent was filed in Salt Lake City just before midnight on September 20, 2011, the same day in which the lead investigator presented the data at the conference in New York City.