ordinary skill in the art would necessarily have made in order to combine the disparate elements.” ’276 Final Decision, 16.5 We concluded, therefore, that the Petition and accompanying Declarations failed to provide “an ‘articulated reason[] with some rational underpinning to support the legal conclusion of obviousness.’” Id. (quoting In re Kahn, 441 F.3d 977, 988 (Fed. Cir. 2006)).
As to Exhibit 1010, we noted that we were not “persuaded by the belated attempt in the Reply and Dr. Morton’s Second Declaration to bolster Petitioner’s initial obviousness challenge by reference to technical advances, e.g., massively parallel sequencing (“MPS”), that one of ordinary skill in the art would have been aware of ‘in the years between the filing of Dhallan and the earliest claimed priority date.’” Id. at 17.
The Federal Circuit noted that our language in the Final Written Decision, “on its face,” supported Petitioner’s assertion that we declined to consider Exhibit 1010 as evidence of what the understanding of the ordinary artisan would have been at the relevant time period “simply because the brochure had not been identified at the petition stage as one of the pieces of prior art defining a combination for obviousness.” Id.
Professors Nussbaum and Morton explain in their declarations that a skilled artisan would also have readily understood that Shoemaker’s methods for determining the presence of fetal abnormalities could be carried out with the use of cell-free DNA described in Dhallan and the multiplexed detection techniques taught in Binladen.
The inadequacy of the obviousness analysis in the Petition and accompanying Declarations is readily apparent when the disparate elements of the references are scrutinized closely, as in Patent Owner’s response, and we decline to search through the record and piece together those teachings that might support Petitioner’s position.