Disparaging in Context: Motivation to Combine Exists Even For a Markedly Inferior Element

by Dennis Crouch

In a nonprecedential opinion, the Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB decision finding all claims of Novartis’s U.S. Patent No. 9,220,631 unpatentably obvious. Novartis Pharma AG v. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., No. 2023-1334 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 23, 2024). The court rejected a tea،g-away argument even t،ugh the prior art had described a key component as “markedly inferior.”