The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has resurrected a previous policy that requires parties to a proceeding at the Patent Trial and Appeals Board to disclose all the parties of interest in the proceeding. PTO said this shift is driven in part by national security considerations, but the reversal forces participants in PTAB proceedings to disclose the identity of any affiliates that may have an interest in the outcome lest the petition for an administrative hearing be denied.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has proposed to limit the use of administrative challenges to patents when the patent in dispute is already the subject of litigation in district court, a change that many in the life sciences might see as an improvement over the current hyper-litigious environment.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has reacted to the Federal Circuit’s decision in Shockwave v. CLSI with a policy memo that draws tighter lines around the use of applicant admitted prior art in attempts to invalidate a patent during inter partes reviews.

The med tech patent wars opened a new front in the region of screening tests for colorectal cancer, pitting Exact Sciences Corp., of Madison, Wisc., against St. Louis-based Geneoscopy Inc.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has reversed a 2022 agency memorandum on discretionary denials of patent procedures, such as inter partes reviews.

The med tech patent wars conscripted another two companies via a patent infringement lawsuit between Inari Medical Inc. and Imperative Care Inc. — a struggle that is playing out in a California district court.

With inter partes reviews (IPR) once feared as patent killers, the mere fact that an IPR petition challenging a drug or device patent had been filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was enough to send a company’s stock tumbling. That initial fear has “kind of ebbed and flowed” over the past 12 years as the patent reviews established by the America Invents Act have come of age, Aziz Burgy, a partner and patent litigator at Axinn, Veltrop & Harkrider LLP, told BioWorld.

Instead of inter partes review (IPR) being a streamlined alternative to costly patent litigation as intended, a precedential decision by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit could make appeals of IPR decisions, regardless of their merits, another way to delay competition.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has once again ruled on a patent dispute between Masimo Corp., of Irvine, Calif., and a rival firm, this time with Sotera Wireless Inc., of San Diego serving as the adversary. The Federal Circuit sided with Sotera in decreeing that 17 claims in Masimo’s RE47,218 (the ’218 patent) are invalidated due to the existence of prior art that rendered the claims obvious, but the irony in this litigation is that one of the patents cited by Sotera as prior art, the 6,597,933 patent, was authored in part by Joe Kiani, the founder, CEO and board chairman of Masimo.