Quest Loses Bid to Revive Parts of a Diagnostic Testing Patent

Quest Diagnostics Investments LLC wasn’t able to convince the Federal Circuit that a patent tribunal relied on obscure evidence that wasn’t publicly available when it found part of a diagnostic testing patent invalid.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board decided numerous claims in Quest’s U.S. Patent No. 8,409,862 are invalid because they’re either obvious or anticipated. The board relied on an abstract that is part of a compact disc from a 2001 American Society for Mass Spectrometry conference.

Quest argued there were hundreds of abstracts on the CD and this particular one couldn’t be easily found. Accordingly, Quest said the ...