Case: Patents/Obviousness (Fed. Cir.)

The Federal Circuit vacated and remanded the decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board holding that Guardant Health Inc. didn’t show that claims of the University of Washington’s patent directed to a method for reducing the error rate in massively parallel DNA sequencing using duplex consensus sequencing are unpatentable as obvious over prior art. The court determined that the board erred by requiring Guardant to show that a skilled artisan would have had a motivation to combine the steps of amplification followed by sequencing and would have had a reasonable expectation of success in performing the amplification and sequencing ...