Federal Circuit vacates PTAB’s decision on foetal testing patent
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has vacated and remanded the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB) decision to invalidate a foetal testing patent.
The decision, handed down yesterday, June 27, stemmed from a clash between Stanford University and The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).
In three interference proceedings, the PTAB found that Stanford’s claims were unpatentable for lack of written description.
But the Federal Circuit disagreed, saying: “Because we conclude that the board relied on improper evidence to support its key findings and did not cite to other substantial evidence to support its findings, we vacate the PTAB’s interference decisions and remand for further proceedings.”
The dispute centred on testing methods for foetal aneuploidies, a condition in which a foetus has an abnormally high or low number of chromosomes.
Stanford professor Stephen Quake and CUHK professor Dennis Lo requested interferences to determine who invented the “random sequencing method” and when it was invented.
In 2013, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced three interferences would take place between Quake’s patents and applications and Lo’s patents and applications.
According to the Federal Circuit ruling, Lo and CUHK claimed that Quake’s US patent number 8,008,018 and the 12/393,833 application were unpatentable for lack of written description.
CUHK claimed that Quake’s description did not support that it had invented the random sequencing method.
But Stanford argued that the ‘018 patent describes every aspect needed to detect aneuploidy using random sequencing and supported that it had invented it.
The PTAB granted CUHK’s written description motion in all three interferences and found that Quake’s claims were unpatentable.
But the Federal Circuit said in its decision: “We vacate and remand the PTAB’s interference decisions for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
This, the Federal Circuit said, is because the PTAB failed to cite any evidence of random sequencing before Quake’s filing date.
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