Purdue Pharma L.P. v. Accord Healthcare, Inc., decided 30 Dec 24

This decision affirms a lower court's ruling that several Purdue Pharma patents related to OxyContin are invalid due to obviousness. The patents covered two aspects: a crush-resistant formulation and a process to reduce a potentially genotoxic impurity. The appeals court reviewed the lower court's findings on motivation to combine prior art, reasonable expectation of success, and secondary considerations of non-obviousness. The court found no clear error in the lower court's determination that a person skilled in the art would have found the claimed inventions obvious, based on prior art and routine experimentation. Therefore, the appeals court upheld the invalidation of the patents.