Appeal No. 1999-1273
Application 08/709,916
In rejecting claims under 35 U.S.C. § 103, the examiner bears the initial burden of
presenting a prima facie case of obviousness. See In re Rijckaert, 9 F.3d 1531, 1532, 28
USPQ2d 1955, 1956 (Fed. Cir. 1993). It is well-established that before a conclusion of
obviousness may be made based on a combination of references, there must have been a
reason, suggestion, or motivation to lead an inventor to combine those references. Pro-
Mold & Tool Co. v. Great Lakes Plastics, Inc., 75 F.3d 1568, 1573,
37 USPQ2d 1626, 1629, (Fed. Cir. 1996) . Furthermore, the conclusion that the claimed
subject matter is prima facie obvious must be supported by evidence, as shown by some
objective teaching in the prior art or by knowledge generally available to one of ordinary
skill in the art that would have led that individual to combine the relevant teachings of the
references to arrive at the claimed invention. See In re Fine, 837 F.2d 1071, 1074, 5
USPQ2d 1596, 1598 (Fed. Cir. 1988). With this as background, we analyze the prior art
applied by the examiner in the rejection of the claims on appeal.
In the present case the examiner relies upon Daugherty as evidence of the
presence of myeloperoxidase in human vascular lesions. Daugherty describes that
myeloperoxidase may contribute to atherogenesis by catalyzing oxidation reactions in the
vascular wall. Answer, page 3. The detection of the myeloperoxidase enzyme in diseased
human vascular tissue is found to be strong support for the hypotheses that
myeloperoxidase, with its ability to promote lipoprotein oxidation by pathways involving
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