PTAB

IPR2018-00918

Nobel Biocare USA LLC v. Spitz Technologies Corp

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Key Events
Petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Self-Drilling, Self-Tapping Dental Implant
  • Brief Description: The ’227 patent relates to a screw-type dental implant with integrated self-drilling and self-tapping features intended to reduce the number of steps, tools, and time required for dental implant surgery. The purported invention achieves this through a specific tip portion design that includes at least one cutting edge for boring into bone that commences at the implant’s longitudinal axis.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness over Perez and Leibinger - Claims 1-19 are obvious over Perez in view of Leibinger.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Perez (European Patent Publication No. 0458258A1) and Leibinger (Patent 5,797,914).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Perez, a self-drilling and self-tapping dental implant, taught almost every limitation of the independent claims. Perez disclosed an implant with a body, tip, and head; lead, intermediate, and distal thread portions; a central bore for a prosthesis; and a tip with cutting edges to form a bore. Petitioner contended the only significant limitation not disclosed by Perez was that the cutting edge must “commence at” the longitudinal axis; Perez’s cutting edge commenced near the axis.
    • Motivation to Combine: A person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would combine the teachings of Perez and Leibinger to improve the self-drilling performance of the Perez implant, particularly in dense bone. Leibinger, a self-boring bone screw designed for oral surgery, explicitly taught a cutting edge formed by a flute that commences at the screw’s longitudinal axis, a feature designed to eliminate the need for a pre-drilled pilot hole.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have had a high expectation of success in this combination. Implant designers routinely looked to analogous fields like surgical screws and drills for proven features. Applying Leibinger’s centered cutting edge design to Perez’s implant was a predictable modification to enhance its self-drilling capability and achieve the shared goal of a more efficient surgical procedure.

Ground 2: Obviousness over Perez, Leibinger, and Bjorn - Claims 1-19 are obvious over Perez in view of Leibinger, and further in view of Bjorn.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Perez, Leibinger, and Bjorn (WO 00/53117).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground supplemented the primary combination by introducing Bjorn to cure any potential deficiencies in Perez’s teachings regarding the self-tapping feature and the “at least three revolutions” limitation of claim 8. Bjorn explicitly disclosed a threaded, self-tapping dental implant with cutting edges on the threads to facilitate cutting into bone tissue. Furthermore, figures in Bjorn showed a lead thread portion with at least three revolutions.
    • Motivation to Combine: To the extent the Perez implant was deemed not sufficiently self-tapping, a POSITA would look to other known implant designs like Bjorn to incorporate a more robust self-tapping feature. Adding cutting edges to the threads was a well-known, standard practice for improving this function. The number of thread revolutions was a routine design choice based on predictable trade-offs between cutting efficiency and implant stability.

Ground 3: Obviousness over Perez, Leibinger, and Binon - Claims 6 and 7 are obvious over Perez in view of Leibinger, and further in view of Binon.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Perez, Leibinger, and Binon (a 2000 journal article).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground specifically addressed dependent claims 6 and 7, which required a roughened flute surface for osseointegration and smooth lead/intermediate thread surfaces. Petitioner introduced Binon, a survey of the dental implant field, for its teaching that combining multiple different surface textures (e.g., smooth and roughened) on a single implant was a known technique to optimize performance.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would have been motivated to apply Binon's teachings to the Perez/Leibinger implant to achieve the known benefits of differential surface treatments. Binon provided the rationale: roughening a surface like a flute enhances bone locking and long-term stability, while keeping thread surfaces smooth reduces insertion torque and drag, allowing for a smoother installation.
    • Expectation of Success: Applying these known surface treatments to different parts of an implant for their specific, well-understood benefits was a straightforward and predictable design modification with a high likelihood of success.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "Lead, intermediate, and distal 'thread portions'" (Claims 1, 15): Petitioner argued these are not terms of art and should be construed broadly under the broadest reasonable interpretation standard to mean the bottom, middle, and top regions of the implant's external thread, without specific boundaries or a required number of revolutions (unless separately claimed).
  • "Thread ... comprises a cutting edge" (Claims 1, 15): Petitioner contended this phrase requires only that the implant's continuous helical thread has a cutting edge at some point along its length to make the implant self-tapping. It does not require that each of the lead, intermediate, and distal portions of the thread must independently possess a cutting edge.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requested institution of an inter partes review (IPR) and cancellation of claims 1-19 of the ’227 patent as unpatentable.