In XY, LLC v. Trans Ova Genetics, LC, [2019-1789] (July 31, 2020), the Federal Circuit reversed the district court’s judgment that the asserted claims of RE46559 are ineligible under §101, and vacated the district court’s determination that claim-preclusion judgment, and remanded for further proceedings. Certain claims of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,732,422, 7,723,116, and 8,652,769 were claim-precluded based on a prior lawsuit filed by XY against Trans Ova.

The ‘559 patent is directed to a method of operating a flow cytometry apparatus with at least n detectors to analyze at least two populations of particles in the same sample. At Alice step one, the district court found that the claims were directed to the mathematical equation that permits rotating multi-dimensional data. At Alice step two, the district court held that the asserted claims lacked an inventive concept because XY admitted that each claim element was known in the art.

Beginning its analysis with Alice step one, the Federal Circuit concluded that the district court erred when it held that the claims are directed to the mathematical equation that permits rotating multi-dimensional data.  The Federal Circuit found that the claims are directed to a purportedly improved method of operating a flow cytometry apparatus. The Federal Circuit found the asserted ’559 patent claims were analogous to the claims at issue in Diehr and Thales. Like the claims in Diehr, the asserted claims “describe in detail a step-by-step method” for accomplishing a physical process. Like the claims in Thales, the claims are directed to a method in which at least two sensors or detectors gather data about an object before mathematical operations are applied to the gathered data to generate more accurate information about the object than was previously possible in the art.

Having concluded that the asserted claims of the ’559 patent are not directed to an abstract idea at Alice step one, the Federal Circuit did not reach Alice step two.

Turning to the issue of claim preclusion, the Federal Circuit said that the parties’ only dispute concerned whether the district court properly concluded that XY’s 2012 and 2016 lawsuits present the same cause of action. XY argued that the district court erred by failing to compare the currently asserted patent claims to the previously asserted patent claims to determine whether the causes of action in the two lawsuits are essentially the same, and the Federal Circuit agreed. The district court’s holding was based solely on the fact that the earlier-asserted patents and the later-asserted patents shared a common specification and were continuations of, and terminally-disclaimed to, the same parent patent. The Federal Circuit concluded that the district court erred in its claim-preclusion analysis by failing to compare the scope of the patent claims asserted in the 2012 lawsuit with the scope of the patent claims asserted in the 2016 lawsuit, and vacated and remanded the case.