MORRISVILLE, NC, Oct. 27, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Liquidia Corporation (NASDAQ: LQDA) announced today that on October 26, 2022, the Precedential Opinion Panel (POP) of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) denied a motion by United Therapeutics (UTC) to review the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB) decision, found in July 2022 between parties Review (IPR) that all claims in US Patent No. 10,716,793 (‘793 patent) over certain prior art cited by Liquidia are not patentable.

The PTAB’s decision invalidating the ‘793 claims was based on three specific pieces of prior art, one patent and two publications. The prior art of the previously granted patent is not in question. To establish the state of the art of the two publications, Liquidia submitted evidence to the IPR that: (1) the publications were presented at major medical conferences, (2) the publications were publicly available in public libraries, and (3) the publications were in other articles in major medical journals that served as research aids. Each of these three reasons alone could establish that the publications constitute prior art. Based on these arguments presented in the IPR, the PTAB determined that the publications constituted prior art for the purposes of the ‘793 patent.

In UTC’s August request for a rehearing of the PTAB’s decision and later for POP review, UTC challenged only the third of the three grounds supporting the prior art status of the two publications. In denying the POP request, the POP noted that the PTAB is best placed to make the relevant prior art findings of the references because the records on these issues were fully developed during the ‘793 IPR process . The PTAB was instructed to clarify the reasons on which it based its finding that the publications constitute prior art. The PTAB’s review of UTC’s request for a rehearing…