Remand Where PTAB Decision Does Not Explain Reasoning, Account for All Evidence

In reviewing a decision from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) deciding three interferences involving competing claims directed to testing methods for fetal aneuploidies, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed a priority award to the junior party, remanding the case back to the PTAB to reconsider its finding that the senior party's claims were unpatentable for failure of written description. Stanford University v. Chinese University of Hong Kong, Case No. 15-2011 (Fed. Cir., June 27, 2017) (O'Malley, J).

Aneuploidies are a condition in which a fetus has either an abnormally high number of chromosomes (e.g., Down's syndrome) or an abnormally low number (e.g., Turner's syndrome). Prior art techniques for diagnosing fetal aneuploidies involved invasive amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling. Less invasive methods, such as ultrasonography and biochemical marker detection, were also used, but those techniques offered suboptimal accuracy. The