Opinion ID: 1034626
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Holding

Text: In view of the record before us, including the disclosure of the 2000 application, we hold that no reasonable jury could find that the claims of the ’723 patent meet the written description requirement of § 112, ¶ 1, and that the district court therefore correctly entered judgment as a matter of law invalidating those claims. In contrast to the claims—which narrowly recite specific alpha-amylase variants that result from mutating a particular parent enzyme at a single amino acid position to yield distinctive functional properties—the supporting disclosure of the 2000 application provides only generalized guidance listing several variables that might, in some combination, lead to a useful result. Taking the claims as a whole rather than as the sum of their individual limitations, nothing in the 2000 application indicates that Novozymes then possessed what it now claims. Finally, the testimony of Novozymes’s experts does not overcome the fundamental deficiencies of the 2000 application’s written description.