Context:
- In June 2017, Elysium Health filed a petition for inter parties review (IPR) with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) of Dartmouth College’s U.S. Patent No. 8,197,807 (“Nicotinamide riboside kinase compositions and methods for using the same”).
- The institution of the IPR was denied, and ChromaDex1 sued Elysium for infringement of the ‘807 patent—as well as U.S. Patent No. 8,383,086 (“Nicotinamide riboside kinase compositions and methods for using the same”)—in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware in September 2018.
- Elysium moved for, and was granted, summary judgment of non-infringement on the basis that the asserted claims are directed toward natural phenomena, and therefore unpatentable.
- After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision (in ChromaDex I), Elysium moved for, and was granted, an award for attorney’s fees amounting to $9.1 million, on exceptionality grounds. ChromaDex appealed to the Federal Circuit for a second time (ChromaDex II).
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Court & counsel
Panel: Circuit Judges Sharon Prost, Raymond Chen, and Kara Stoll.
ChromaDex and the Trustees of Dartmouth College are being represented by Covington & Burling’s Mark Mosier and Robert Allen Long, Jr.
Meanwhile, Elysium Health is being represented by Foley Hoag’s Jeremy Younkin and Donald Ross Ware.
- ChromaDex is the exclusive licensee of the ‘807 and ‘086 patents. In the District of Delaware litigation, ChromaDex and the Trustees of Dartmouth College were co-plaintiffs. ↩︎
- 2019 Federal Circuit opinion concluding that a dietary supplement containing a natural product had markedly different characteristics from the natural product itself, because the claims recited a particular amount of the natural product sufficient to “effectively increase… performance when administered”. ↩︎