Before Prost, Newman, Lourie, Dyk, Moore, O’Malley, Reyna, Wallach, Taranto, Chen, Hughes, and Stoll. On petition for rehearing en banc.
Summary: Under step two of the Alice framework, whether a claim element or combination would have been well-understood, routine, and conventional is a question of fact.
Before Reyna, Taranto, and Hughes. Appeal from the Northern District of California.
Summary: Failure to use the word “means” creates a rebuttable presumption that the term is not a means-plus-function limitation invoking § 112 ¶ 6. That presumption was not overcome here because the challenger did not prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the claim terms failed to recite sufficiently definite structure.
DePuy Synthes, a part of the Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices Companies, announced recently that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the assets of Medical Enterprises Distribution, LLC, which includes the automated ME1000™ Surgical Impactor tool used in hip replacement surgery. The two companies had previously formed an exclusive agreement to co-market the hip application of the ME1000™.
Before Prost, Newman, and Wallach. Appeal from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.
Summary: An unsupported expert opinion does not constitute substantial evidence to contradict a prior art reference.
Before Newman, Dyk, and Chen. Appeal from the District of Colorado.
Summary: (1) The Federal Circuit’s separate affirmance of a PTAB decision that a patent in suit is invalid renders an appeal from a district court on that patent moot due to collateral estoppel; and (2) an ongoing royalty determination should consider patentee’s improved bargaining position after the jury verdict.
On May 14, 2018, several important revisions to regulations of the Bayh-Dole Act (University and Small Business Patent Procedure Act of 1980, codified as 35 U.S.C. § 200) went into effect. The final revisions were published in the Federal Register of April 18, 2018.
Before Reyna, Clevenger, and Wallach. Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Colorado
Summary: Even in a simple mechanical case, a narrow disclosure in the specification of a priority application may not provide adequate written description support for broad, later-issued claims which claim priority to that application.
On April 26, 2018, the China Drug Administration (CDA) released a draft guideline of implementing rules on pharmaceutical data exclusivity for public comments. The draft guideline expands the scope of data protection from innovative drugs to also now cover innovative therapeutic biologics, orphan drugs, pediatric drugs, as well as drug products that have succeeded in a patent challenge (“first generics”).
In vitro gametogenesis (IVG) is a recent development in reproductive technology, and has been used for creating mouse embryos in vitro. IVG includes obtaining cells from a donor (such as skin cells), and differentiating the cells in a laboratory culture dish into gametes (eggs and sperm). Differentiated eggs can be inseminated with differentiated sperm in the laboratory culture dish to generate embryos for implantation into a womb.
Before Prost, Newman, and Lourie. Appeal from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTAB)
Summary: A limitation that merely claims information by incorporating that information into a mental step or process is not entitled to patentable weight under the printed matter doctrine, unless the limitation is functionally related to the substrate.
