IP Law Daily, PATENT—E.D. Va.: Patent application for dietary formulations properly rejected as claiming natural substances, (Mar 31, 2023)

By Kevin M. Finson, J.D.

The PTAB did not err in rejecting most claims under Alice and the remining claims as obvious.

An inventor’s application for a patent claiming nutritional formulations was properly rejected the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, the federal district court in Alexandria has held. Most of the proposed claims failed the Alice test and were directed at patent-ineligible natural substances (such as almonds) prepared in well-known ways and the remaining claims were obvious in light of relevant prior art (Bhagat v. USPTO, March 30, 2023, Hilton, C.).

Urvashi Bhagat was the inventor named on U.S. Patent Application 13/877,847, which described nutritional formulations such as supplements, meal components, or meals, all delivered orally and which could be chosen based on a person’s characteristics and which contained certain nutrients derived from natural sources such as almonds or mixtures of seeds and oils. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board found the claims unpatentable as obvious in light of the prior art. Bhagat appealed to the Eastern District of Virginia under 35 U.S.C. § 145. The USPTO moved for summary judgment and Bhagat moved to strike.

Motion to strike. Bhagat moved to strike the USPTO’s motion for summary judgment on the ground that discovery was not complete and that there was a pending interlocutory appeal. The court noted that the Fourth Circuit had already denied a motion to stay proceedings pending the interlocutory appeal and that Bhagat had already had four months to conduct discovery. The motion to strike was denied.

Natural products. Applying the two-step Alice test for patent ineligible concepts, the court held that the majority of the claims were directed to simple and natural food products such as almonds. A naturally occurring plant product was clearly not patent eligible. Bhagat’s arguments that she presented an inventive concept by preparing the products boiled down to longstanding, conventional, and well-known processes such as pounding the almonds into a powder and arranging them in packages of a specified size.

Obviousness. The court held that the remaining claims were obvious in light of a prior published patent application for preparing and administering an overlapping set of nutrients. The court also found that the health benefits of almonds and the other products at issue were well known in the art prior to Bhagat’s application.

Finding that Bhagat had presented no evidence to show a genuine question of material fact on any of the issues in the case, the court granted the USPTO’s motion for summary judgment.

The Case is No. 1:20-cv-01515-CMH-IDD.

Attorneys: Urvashi Bhagat, pro se. Matthew J. Mezger for the USPTO.

Cases: Patent VirginiaNews USPTO