Appeal No. 2001-2004 Page 12
Application No. 08/956,715
in the manner proposed by the examiner, and we therefore will not sustain this
rejection.
(6)
Claims 11 and 12, which depend from independent claim 6, along with
independent claim 13 and dependent claim 14, stand rejected as being unpatentable
over Burrell in view of Bosley and Schwartz. These claims call for the implantable
device to be a vascular stent, and the examiner looks to Schwartz for its teaching of
applying a tissue-compatible material to a vascular stent, concluding that it would have
been obvious to make the Burrell device a vascular stent.
We do not consider Schwartz to provide teachings which overcome the lack of
suggestion to combine the Burrell and Bosley references in the manner proposed by
the examiner to render independent claim 6 obvious, and therefore we will not sustain
this rejection of claims 11 and 12.
Independent claim 13 is directed to a stent comprising elemental silver or silver
alloys having at least 50% by weight silver, which have a specific surface density of
about 20 to 30 dynes per centimeter. For the reasons discussed above with regard to
the rejection of claims 1-3 and 6-10, it is our view that there is no suggestion to combine
Burrell and Bosley in the manner proposed by the examiner in order to render claim 13
obvious. This conclusion is not overcome by further consideration of Schwartz, which
does not overcome this problem.
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