Appeal No. 2001-0692 Page 4
Application No. 09/163,572
appears once on each plate. However, no two compounds have the same pair of
well locations.” Id., page 7.
After the X and Y master plates are produced, they are subjected to any of
a variety of biological assays. See, e.g., pages 25-28. The pattern of positively
reacting samples on the X and Y master plates identifies a specific compound or
set of compounds as having positive activity in the screen.
Visually, when a hit is observed at a well in the Y plate, one can
conclude that the hit resulted due to an active compound located at
the same well location in one of the ten simple plates. A hit in the
same row of the X plate can then be used to determine which of the
ten simple plates contains the active compound. Specifically, the
column number of the hit represents the simple plate which
contains the active compound.
Specification, page 18.
The advantage of this, even given the probability of testing inactive
compounds, is that the biological testers can go directly to
quantitative screening with individual compounds. There is no
need to create plates that contain the individual compounds. The
same plate pairs can be sent to multiple screens, without need to
create differently arranged plates for each screen.
Id., page 8.
Discussion
1. Indefiniteness
The examiner rejected all of the claims as indefinite. See the Examiner’s
Answer, page 7:
The preamble of claim 1 is directed to testing for activity but the
claim lacks any such step. In view of claim 1 directed to activity,
the dependent claims are not directed to activity where claims 8, 9,
13 are directed to ability, claims 14, 16 are directed to presence,
claims 15, 17 are directed to absence, and so forth.
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