Opinion ID: 3201535
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: IBS’s Improper Reply Brief

Text: IBS also argues that “the Board must consider whether it is within the skill of the ordinary artisan to modify the cleavage conditions to satisfy the alleged cleavage requirements.” Appellant Br. 44. The Board did not consider this argument, however, because it was raised for the first time in IBS’s reply brief and expert declaration. 16 INTELLIGENT BIO-SYSTEMS, INC. v. ILLUMINA CAMBRIDGE LTD. It is of the utmost importance that petitioners in the IPR proceedings adhere to the requirement that the initial petition identify “with particularity” the “evidence that supports the grounds for the challenge to each claim.” 35 U.S.C. § 312(a)(3). “All arguments for the relief requested in a motion must be made in the motion. A reply may only respond to arguments raised in the corresponding opposition or patent owner response.” 37 C.F.R. § 42.23(b). Once the Board identifies new issues presented for the first time in reply, neither this court nor the Board must parse the reply brief to determine which, if any, parts of that brief are responsive and which are improper. As the Board noted, “it will not attempt to sort proper from improper portions of the reply.” Office Patent Trial Practice Guide, 77 Fed. Reg. 48,756, 48,767 (Aug. 14, 2012). IBS argued in its petition that “Zavgorodny teaches the desired property [in Tsien] that the azidomethyl group ‘can be removed under very specific and mild conditions.’” J.A. 145–46 (quoting Zavgorodny, J.A. 861). Illumina presented evidence in its response that, “an ordinary artisan would not have considered Zavgorodny’s conditions suitably mild for Tsien’s sequencing purposes.” Id. IBS’s reply then argued, for the first time, “that an ordinary artisan would have considered it obvious to use deprotecting conditions other than those described in Zavgorodny.” Id. But IBS chose which grounds of invalidity to assert in its petition and it chose not to assert this new one. Unlike district court litigation—where parties have greater freedom to revise and develop their arguments over time and in response to newly discovered material—the expedited nature of IPRs bring with it an obligation for petitioners to make their case in their petition to institute. While the Board’s requirements are strict ones, they are requirements of which petitioners are aware when they seek to institute an IPR. INTELLIGENT BIO-SYSTEMS, INC. v. 17 ILLUMINA CAMBRIDGE LTD. IBS supported its new theory of invalidity by reference to new evidence, citing “a number of non-patent literature references which were not relied upon to support unpatentability in the Petition.” Id. at . See Office Patent Trial Practice Guide, 77 Fed. Reg. at 48,767 (“Examples of indications that a new issue has been raised in a reply include new evidence necessary to make out a prima facie case for the . . . unpatentability of an original . . . claim, and new evidence that could have been presented in a prior filing.”). In these circumstances, we find that the Board did not err in refusing the reply brief as improper under 37 C.F.R. § 42.23(b) because IBS relied on an entirely new rationale to explain why one of skill in the art would have been motivated to combine Tsien or Ju with a modification of Zavgorodny. Because we conclude that the reply brief and accompanying declaration exceeded the scope of the reply under § 42.23(b), and, therefore, that the Board did not abuse its discretion in excluding those documents, we need not resolve whether the reply brief complied with 37 C.F.R. § 42.6(a)(3), which states that “[a]rguments must not be incorporated by reference from one document into another document.” See Intelligent Bio-Sys., Inc., 2015 WL 996355, at . Nor do we review the Board’s conclusion that, even if proper, the arguments contained in the reply brief are unpersuasive for the same reason it found the arguments in the petition unpersuasive. Id. at .