Appeal No. 1998-3050
Application No. 08/586,116
is disposed longitudinally within the pipette tip. However,
based on the state of the prior art, as evidenced by Ebersole and
Elkins, we find no error in the examiner's conclusion that it
would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art to
employ a substrate strip comprising a plurality of distinct
reactant binding agents in the pipette tip of Wainright in order
to attain the art-recognized need for simultaneously detecting a
plurality of different target molecules in a sample, such as
blood or urine. Elkins establishes that it was known in the art
to utilize a strip comprising spaced-apart distinct reactant
binding agents for detecting the presence of a plurality of
different target molecules in a sample, and we find that
Analytes 1, 2 and 3 of Ebersole's Figure 5 would have suggested
the use of such a strip in the pipette tip of Wainright. As
noted by the examiner, Ebersole teaches that the capture reagent,
or reactant binding agent, can be immobilized by attachment to a
solid support (column 9, lines 47-51).
Wainright, the primary reference, is directed to the
structure of the pipette tip and not the number of reactant
binding agents housed therein. However, Wainright's teaching
that the pipette tip houses a solid surface that has coated
thereon "any one of a number of conventional immobilization
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