Titan Medical Inc. (“Titan”) announced on March 18, 2024, that it is merging with Conavi Medical Inc. (“Conavi”).

Titan is a medical technology licensing company based in Toronto with an extensive patent portfolio focusing on robotic assisted surgery. Conavi is a medical device company specializing in minimally invasive image-guidance technology for cardiovascular procedures.

INLINE PLASTICS CORP V. LACERTA GROUP, LLC

Before Taranto, Chen, and Hughes. Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

Summary: Jury instructions must instruct the jury to consider all relevant objective indicia of non-obviousness.

VIRTEK VISION INTERNATIONAL ULC, v. ASSEMBLY GUIDANCE SYSTEMS, INC., DBA ALIGNED VISION

Before Moore, Hughes, and Stark. Appeal from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”).

Summary: Merely showing that prior art elements were known to a person skilled in the art without providing a reason to combine the references does not prove obviousness.

On March 20, 2024, The USPTO issued an alert, notifying practitioners that the USPTO had developed training materials for patent examiners regarding searching for prior art in FDA and NIH databases. The new training materials were presented to the public at the Biotechnology, Chemical, and Pharmaceutical Partnership Meeting, held in person at the USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, and at the USPTO Silicon Valley Regional Office in San Jose, California, on March 19, 2020.

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced new regulations to reduce ethylene oxide emissions. According to the EPA’s press release, the new regulations are “the strongest measures in U.S. history to reduce emissions of [ethylene oxide], one of the most potent cancer-causing chemicals.” The new regulations can be found here. The press release states that the regulations will affect “nearly 90 commercial sterilization facilities . . . owned and operated by approximately 50 companies.” The regulations require installation of air pollution controls to reduce emissions by more than 90%. The regulations are intended to reduce lifetime cancer risk for those living nearby sterilization facilities.

In this episode of the Knobbe IP+ podcast, Knobbe Martens partner Mauricio A. Uribe speaks with European Patent Attorney and Ph. D. Hanane Fathi Roswall on the recently adopted EU…

MAXELL, LTD., V. AMPEREX TECHNOLOGY LIMITED

Before Prost, Taranto, and Chen. Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas.

Summary: Two claim limitations are not contradictory if they can be satisfied simultaneously.

K-FEE SYSTEM GMBH v. NESPRESSO USA, INC.

Before Taranto, Clevenger, and Stoll. Appeal from the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

Summary: The Federal Circuit did not need to decide whether statements to the European Patent Office (EPO) can disavow claim scope in a U.S. patent because the statements in this case were too ambiguous to constitute disavowal.

NETFLIX, INC. V. DIVX, LLC

Before Dyk, Linn, and Chen. Appeal from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

Summary: The PTAB did not abuse its discretion by declining to address arguments that an IPR petitioner failed to clearly raise in its petitions.

As we recently discussed recently discussed, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) sent warning letters to certain drug manufacturers regarding their purportedly improper listing of device patents in the Food and Drug Administration’s (“FDA”) Approved Drug Products with Therapeutic Equivalence Evaluations (“Orange Book”). Rahul Rao, the deputy director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition and the person who signed the warning letters, recently explained the FTC’s position in unequivocal terms: “The Orange Book is only supposed to list patents covering active drug ingredients. So, we focused on device patents that have nothing to do with the active drug.”