Case: Patents/Obviousness (P.T.A.B.)

Challenged claims of Molecular Loop Innovations LLC’s patent that relates generally to methods for maintaining the integrity and identification of a nucleic acid template in a multiplex sequencing reaction aren’t unpatentable as obvious over prior art, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board said, in an inter partes review by Illumina Inc. The board determined that the challenged claims aren’t obvious over various combinations of prior art, including prior art that describes a high-information-content barcoding approach in which each sample is associated with two uniquely designed, 10-nucleotide barcodes; and a low-cost, high-throughput microbiome profiling method that uses combinatorial sequence tags attached ...