Federal Circuit vacates and remands PTAB’s NuVasive, Medtronic decision
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has vacated and remanded a decision from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB).
The decision, which was handed down yesterday, May 31, stemmed from an appeal by medical device company NuVasive.
NuVasive’s US patent number 8,016,767 claims “surgical methods for inserting a spinal fusion implant along a lateral, transpsoas path to the spine using nerve monitoring to avoid damaging sensitive motor neurons”.
After NuVasive asserted the ‘767 patent against Medtronic, Medtronic filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) of the patent.
The PTAB instituted a review of eight claims and found that they were all unpatentable for obviousness.
NuVasive appealed against the decision, challenging the board’s construction of the claim phrase “lateral, transpsoas path”, focusing its challenge on the term “lateral” in that phrase.
According to NuVasive, the PTAB’s construction of “lateral, transpsoas path to the spine” is unreasonably broad.
The Federal Circuit agreed, explaining that: “With respect to the word ‘lateral,’ the PTAB’s analysis was limited. It said that the specification did not define that word… it’s a fairly broad basis as to what ‘lateral’ means.”
NuVasive also challenged the PTAB’s finding of a motivation to combine the prior-art references and its treatment of objective-indicia evidence, concerning commercial success, industry praise, and other non-prior art considerations, that NuVasive presented in arguing against obviousness.
But the Federal Circuit decided not to address those arguments, and instead ordered the board to reconsider the matters on remand.
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