BACKGROUND
The appellant's invention relates to conformable endplates for artificial disc
replacement (ADR) devices. A copy of the claims under appeal is set forth in the
appendix to the appellant's brief.
The examiner relies upon the following as evidence of unpatentability:
Frey US 4,932,969 Jun. 12, 1990
Suddaby US 6,395,034 B1 May 28, 2002 (Nov. 24, 1999)
The rejections of claims 1-4 under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) as being anticipated by Frey,
claims 1, 6, 8 and 9 under 35 U.S.C. § 102(e) as being anticipated by Suddaby and claim
7 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Suddaby are before us for review.
Rather than reiterate in their entirety the conflicting viewpoints advanced by the
examiner and the appellant regarding this appeal, we make reference to the final rejection
(mailed December 30, 2004) and examiner's answer (mailed August 10, 2005) for the
examiner's complete reasoning in support of the rejections and to the appellant's brief
(filed July 7, 2005) and reply brief (filed October 10, 2005) for the appellant's arguments
thereagainst.
OPINION
In reaching our decision in this appeal, we have given careful consideration to the
appellant's specification and claims, to the applied prior art, and to the respective
positions articulated by the appellant and the examiner. For the reasons that follow, we
cannot sustain the examiner’s rejections.
We begin our review of this appeal with a list of deficiencies in the examiner’s
answer. The examiner’s statement on page 2 of the answer that the brief does not contain
a statement identifying the related appeals and interferences which will directly affect or
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007