Appeal No. 95-4962
Application No. 07/972,660
Tables I and II at pages 5 and 6. These studies indicate that
the dissolution rate is dependent on the amount of polymers
employed. See also the paragraph bridging pages 4 and 5.
Moreover, the desired sustained-release rate of a drug is
dependent on the desired concentration of a drug in a blood
stream, thus avoiding the risk of toxicity associated with a
higher concentration of the drug therein. See page 3, lines
60-65 and page 4, lines 1-9. Accordingly, we conclude that
optimizing the amount of the polymers employed to obtain
desired dissolution rates presumably as claimed would have
been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art. See In re
Woodruff,
919 F.2d 1575, 1578, 16 USPQ2d 1934, 1936-37 (Fed. Cir. 1990);
In re Boesch, 617 F.2d 272, 276, 205 USPQ 215, 219 (CCPA 1980)
(optimizing a known result-effective variable is well within
the ambit of one of ordinary skill in the art). One of
ordinary skill in the art would have had a reasonable
expectation of avoiding the risk of toxicity associated with a
high concentration of a drug in the blood stream via
controlling the rate of its dissolution.
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