US 4496352

I'll search for authoritative records on this patent number, then summarize.

US 4,496,352 — Record Check and Summary

Search results first: litigation status

I searched for litigation and Federal Circuit docket activity involving 4,496,352 specifically. No CAFC 2026 docket, ITC action, or district-court case naming this patent appeared. The 2026 appellate results returned (e.g., Contour IP Holding LLC v. GoPro, Inc., Fed. Cir. No. 2026‑2012; Headwater Research LLC v. Verizon, E.D. Tex. 2:23‑cv‑00635, USCA No. 26‑1884) involve unrelated patents and are not associated with 4,496,352. This is consistent with the prosecution history: the patent lapsed on 1993‑01‑31 for failure to pay maintenance fees, and the maintenance‑fee lapse was formally recorded 1993‑04‑13 (FP), with a 2018 status entry confirming expiration under 37 CFR 1.362. A patent that lapsed in 1993 cannot be the subject of a live 2026 infringement appeal. Treat "no litigation found" as a search result, not a certified global negative.

Bibliographic data

Abstract (as printed)

"A cannula support assembly comprises a hub subassembly, which supports the cannula, and a cover subassembly, which attaches to the hub subassembly to sealingly enclose the cannula prior to use and which can be easily removed from and subsequently reattached to the hub subassembly, if desired. Each subassembly is itself preferably fabricated from one or more individually extruded component parts which can be assembled together in a manner lending itself to cost efficient, automated production techniques and which thereby obviates the use of substantially more costly injection molded or compression molded plastic parts. The resulting support assembly is durable, easily attachable to flexible tubing, and readily adaptable to diverse uses, such as a hub and cover for a phlebotomy needle or an inline sampling needle."

Claim 1 — the sole independent claim, in plain language

Claim 1 is an apparatus claim. Read element by element, it requires:

The hub portion:

1. A first member with a bore.
2. A second member with two opposite end portions, which occupies only a portion of that bore (i.e., not the whole bore).
3. One end of the second member sits outwardly of the bore for attachment to a fluid conduit (the tubing end).
4. The opposite end of the second member is confined inside that occupied portion of the bore — i.e., the needle side is recessed, not protruding.
5. The second member has its own bore running end‑to‑end, holding the cannula so that the operative (beveled) end sticks out of the confined end and projects beyond the first member's bore.

The cover portion:
6. An outer member, and an inner member with an open interior whose main body sits inside the outer member, with one end portion protruding outwardly from the outer member.
7. That protruding end is removably engageable in an interference fit inside the remaining, unoccupied portion of the first member's bore.
8. That fit secures the cover to the hub, with the exposed cannula end enclosed within the open interior.

Plain-language upshot: the claim covers a two‑part, telescoping needle hub where the needle carrier is recessed inside a bore and the cover's inner sleeve plugs into the leftover annular/bore space to lock the cover on. It is written to read on the recessed/FIG. 10 arrangement — note the "remaining portion of said first member bore not occupied by said second member" language, which is what distinguishes it from the assembly as shown in the FIG. 2–5 phlebotomy embodiment.

Dependent claims (2–9) — plain language

• Claim 2 — adds that the inner member's other end also protrudes from the outer member, so it can attach to a fluid conduit on both sides (the inline sampling-needle configuration).
• Claim 3 — adds a plug insertable into that opposite end to seal it closed (i.e., converting the assembly into a closed cover). (Source text prints "c1aim 1" with a numeral one in place of the letter l; interpreted literally as a dependency on claim 1.)
• Claim 4 — limits the cover to an outer tubular body with a bore, and an inner tubular body seated in that bore.
• Claim 5 — both tubular bodies have generally uniform cross‑sectional shapes.
• Claim 6 — those tubular bodies are made by extrusion.
• Claim 7 — limits the hub: the first member is a tubular body with a bore, and the second member is a tubular body seated in that bore.
• Claim 8 — both hub tubular bodies have generally uniform cross‑sectional shapes.
• Claim 9 — depends on claim 7 or 8, and requires the first and second tubular bodies to be made by extrusion.

So the extrusion-manufacturing limitations live only in claims 6 and 9 — claims 1–5 and 7–8 are silent on the fabrication method, which matters for any invalidity/scope analysis.

Notable observations and uncertainties

• Title vs. claims mismatch: the title recites "and its method of manufacture," and the specification describes a step‑by‑step assembly process (steps A–I, FIG. 11), but all nine claims are apparatus claims. No method claim was granted in this patent.
• Continuation relationship: this patent is a continuation of Ser. No. 326,739, which issued as U.S. 4,413,992. The specification text here is the parent's disclosure; the claim set was changed. If you need the full prosecution picture, you must pull the 4,413,992 file separately.
• Assignee chain caveat: the original assignee field says Baxter Travenol Laboratories, Inc.; Google Patents lists Baxter International Inc. as current assignee while expressly disclaiming accuracy of that list. I have no assignment‑record verification beyond that.
• Docket-source uncertainty: I did not query the USPTO PatentCenter or PACER directly; the "no litigation" conclusion rests on public web search results only, and should be re‑verified against PACER/PatentCenter if the litigation question is load‑bearing.
• Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4496352/en and https://patents.justia.com/patent/4496352 (specification text matches the authoritative full text supplied).

I'll search multiple litigation-focused sources for US patent 4496352.

The initial searches returned unrelated results. Let me query litigation-specific databases directly.

Let me search more targeted litigation sources.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 4,496,352

Bottom line

I found no record of any litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 4,496,352.

Searches of litigation-oriented sources (including the Unified Patents litigation portal, Docket Alarm/PTAB records, CourtListener/recap, and general web searches keyed to both "4496352" and "4,496,352") returned no district court cases, no ITC investigations, and no PTAB proceedings in which this patent was asserted or challenged. Searches for the patent number also returned unrelated matters (e.g., a trade-secret/patent case involving a different patent, the '635 patent, and various Unified Patents IPR documents concerning unrelated patents), none of which involved U.S. 4,496,352.

No litigation is known. I cannot provide plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome for a case that does not appear to exist.

Why this result is not surprising

Several characteristics of the patent make litigation assertion unlikely, which is consistent with the negative search result:

1. It lapsed very early. Per the legal events in the record, maintenance fees were not paid and the patent lapsed effective January 31, 1993 (lapse / FP events in 1993). The patent was never maintained to its full term (which would have run to roughly December 2001 / January 2002, given the Dec. 2, 1981 priority date). A patent that lapsed in 1993 has effectively been unassertable for over three decades.

2. It was a continuation, not a pioneer filing. U.S. 4,496,352 is a continuation of Ser. No. 326,739 (filed Dec. 2, 1981), which issued as U.S. 4,413,992. Both are titled "Cannula support assembly and its method of manufacture" and name Emil H. Soika, originally assigned to Baxter Travenol Laboratories, Inc. (current listed assignee: Baxter International Inc.). If any enforcement activity ever occurred in this family, it would more plausibly have been on the parent patent, and I found no litigation on that either.

3. The claims are directed to a relatively narrow mechanical structure — a two-member extruded hub subassembly with an interference-fit cover subassembly (the 9 issued claims recite the hub's first/second member bore arrangement, the cover's outer/inner member, and extruded tubular bodies of uniform cross-section). Narrow, mature mechanical claims of this type, especially in a patent that lapsed in 1993, rarely generate reported litigation.

Important scope caveats

• My searches covered commonly used litigation aggregators and general web sources. Older (pre-2000) and never-digitized case filings may not surface in those sources, so I cannot rule out an obscure 1980s–early-1990s suit that was never indexed online. What I can state is that nothing in the available record shows assertions of U.S. 4,496,352.
• I have deliberately not attributed any case to this patent that I could not verify. The search results surfaced several patent cases and IPR proceedings, but none referenced this patent number.
• If you need to run this down conclusively, the definitive checks would be: (a) the USPTO Patent Assignment / litigation history for patent 4,496,352, (b) a PACER docket search on "4,496,352" restricted to the relevant districts, and (c) a commercial Lex Machina / Docket Navigator patent case search. None of those returned a verified hit in what I was able to review.

Conclusion: Based on the sources available to me, there is no known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 4,496,352, and the patent's early 1993 lapse makes historic assertion unlikely. I cannot supply case details because no qualifying case was found — I will not fabricate them.

PTAB / AIA Trial Analysis — US 4,496,352 (Soika, "Cannula support assembly and its method of manufacture")

Proceedings overview

Zero (0) AIA trial proceedings are on file against US 4,496,352 — no IPR, no PGR, no CBM. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block drawn from the USPTO Open Data Portal returns an empty set, and targeted web searches for IPR/PGR/CBM activity naming patent 4,496,352 or its petitioner-side family returned nothing (searched 2026‑09‑28). Bottom-line defensive posture for a defendant: there is no claim-level PTAB outcome to litigate from, but that is not a "hardened patent" signal — the patent lapsed 1993‑01‑31 for non‑payment of maintenance fees and has been in the public domain for 33 years. If a demand letter cites US 4,496,352 in 2026, the assertion is dead on its face (see Strategic summary), and the absence of IPRs reflects that no one has had an economic reason to file one, not that the claims have survived scrutiny.

No proceedings to report — what was checked, and why the null result is expected

• Source of record: the canonical "PTAB proceedings on file" block in this prompt (USPTO Open Data Portal ingest). It is empty for this patent. No proceeding numbers are invented here; per the constraint, I will not manufacture an IPR/PGR/CBM number where none exists.
• Web cross-check (2026‑09‑28): searches for the patent number in combination with "IPR," "PTAB," "inter partes review," "CBM," "Soika," "Baxter Travenol," and CourtListener/docket terms surfaced no petition, institution decision, FWD, or appeal tied to 4,496,352. The PTAB documents returned by those queries belong to unrelated patents (e.g., IPR2013‑00194 / CBM2013‑00013, U.S. 8,108,492; IPR2017‑01590, U.S. 9,370,641; IPR2018‑00404, U.S. 8,935,351).
• Three structural reasons the null is expected, not surprising:
  1. Timing. AIA trials (IPR/PGR/CBM) became available only for petitions filed on or after 2012‑09‑16. By that date this patent had already been lapsed and unenforceable for ~19.5 years.
  2. Statutory unavailability of two of the three vehicle types. PGR requires an effective filing date on or after 2013‑03‑16 (35 U.S.C. §§ 321–329) — inapplicable to a 1981‑priority patent. CBM requires a covered business method (financial‑services) claim — this is a needle/hub extrusion patent, categorically outside CBM subject matter. Only IPR was theoretically available, and only from 2012‑09‑16 onward.
  3. No economic predicate. With the patent lapsed effective 1993‑01‑31, there is nothing to license, assert, or defend. IPR fees, expert costs, and a 12‑month trial clock buy a defendant nothing when the patent owner has no damages case.

Caveat, stated plainly: "no proceedings found" is a documented search result against the ODP ingest plus public web sources, not a certified global negative. If a proceeding were filed and not yet indexed, it would be recent by definition and would necessarily be aimed at an expired patent — a posture the Board permits (it applies Phillips construction to expired claims) but which almost no petitioner pays to pursue.

Strategic summary

Claim status — CANCELED: none. SUSTAINED: none. UNTESTED: all of claims 1–9. Because no AIA trial ever reached a Final Written Decision, there is no claim-level cancellation, no substitute-claim amendment, and no Board validity holding to cite. Every claim — independent claim 1 and dependents 2–9 — stands exactly as it issued on 1985‑01‑29, untested at the PTAB. Additionally, and as flagged in the earlier summary, all nine claims are apparatus claims; the process steps A–I of FIG. 11 were never claimed, so there is no method claim to evaluate.

Estoppel landscape — no estoppel attaches to anyone. 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estops only a petitioner (and its real parties in interest or privies) that obtained an FWD, and § 315(e)(1) estops only IPR/PGR petitioners that reached a final decision. With no IPRs, no petitioner estoppel exists, no § 325(e) PGR estoppel exists, and no § 315(b) one-year bar has been triggered by service of a complaint. So a defendant today is not foreclosed from any prior-art ground — but that freedom is worthless here, because the operative bar is not estoppel; it is the 1993 lapse plus 35 U.S.C. § 286 (six-year back-damages window). Any infringement theory would have to point to acts after 1993‑01‑31, when the patent had already expired, and any recovery reaching back would be time-barred many times over. The right defense is a threshold expiration/§ 286/§ 271 point, not an invalidity ground.

Pattern signals — none. There is no serial petitioner, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents or similar) in the chain, and no evidence of patent-owner appellate aggression — unsurprising given that the patent owner, Baxter Travenol Laboratories (now Baxter International), let the patent lapse at the 7.5‑year fee window rather than pay. Google Patents legal events show a 1988‑06‑24 fee payment (4‑year), a 1992‑09‑02 maintenance-fee reminder, a 1993‑01‑31 lapse, and a 1993‑04‑13 "Lapsed due to failure to pay maintenance fee" entry, with a 2018‑01‑23 administrative status entry confirming expiration under 37 CFR 1.362. The sibling case is worth noting if any question arises about the disclosure: this patent is a continuation of Ser. No. 326,739, filed 1981‑12‑02, which issued as U.S. 4,413,992 — I found no PTAB activity against 4,413,992 either, but treat that as a search result, not a certified negative, and pull that file separately if the lineage matters.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant and a demand letter or complaint cites US 4,496,352: do not build a PTAB or prior-art strategy. The governing facts are the maintenance-fee lapse and the statutory bar. Pin the record to the Google Patents legal-events page (https://patents.google.com/patent/US4496352/en) and, for the Office's own record, to PatentCenter/Assignment for Application 06/517,546 (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/) and ODP (https://developer.uspto.gov/api-catalog). The dispositive points are: (i) lapse effective 1993‑01‑31 under 37 CFR 1.362; (ii) no infringement liability for conduct after expiration; and (iii) 35 U.S.C. § 286's six-year damages window, which makes any pre-2020 conduct unrecoverable even in theory. Consider a fee-shifting/sanctions posture under 35 U.S.C. § 285 and Rule 11 if the assertion is made with knowledge of the 1993 lapse.
• No FWD to link or quote. There is no Final Written Decision, institution decision, or termination to cite, because there is no proceeding. I will not supply a fabricated docket link. The canonical empty-state source is the USPTO ODP API's trials dataset; PTAB document searching, if you want to double-check independently, is at the PTAB Center / PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/) and decisions are posted at USPTO PTAB Decisions — note the legacy "e2e" docket site was retired, so use the PTAB Center.
• Metals for the timeline question: no trial-stage milestones exist. Were a petition somehow filed, the PTAB's statutory clock (35 U.S.C. § 316(a)(11)) would run one year from institution to FWD, with the § 314(b) institution deadline at three months from the patent owner's preliminary response (or its due date). None of those dates exist on file.
• Bottom line, stated plainly: the absence of PTAB activity on US 4,496,352 is not a "the patent survived and is hardened" signal — it is a "the patent has been dead since 1993" signal. Well-asserted patents do attract IPRs; this one was never asserted post-AIA because it could not be. If your client is being pursued on this number, the exposure is a paperwork problem, not a patent problem.

Sources for this section: USPTO Open Data Portal trials ingest ("PTAB proceedings on file" block, empty for this patent); https://patents.google.com/patent/US4496352/en (bibliographic data, legal events, family, cited-by); public web searches on 2026‑09‑28 for IPR/PGR/CBM activity naming 4,496,352 (no results). No PTAB or Federal Circuit opinion is cited because none exists for this patent.

I'll research the assignment/ownership chain for this patent.

US 4,496,352 — Ownership-Chain Reconstruction

Data-retrieval caveat up front (load-bearing): I was unable to query the USPTO Assignment Center directly — I have no direct fetch against assignmentcenter.uspto.gov or the legacy assignment.uspto.gov search in this session, and no indexed assignment record for patent 4,496,352 surfaced through open web search. I therefore have not retrieved any reel/frame number, conveyance-type code, execution date, recording date, or assignment correspondent for this patent. Per your constraint against fabricating assignments, nothing below is presented as a reel/frame citation. Where I state ownership facts, I say exactly what they rest on. Search link for verification: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html#/patent/search?q=4496352 (equivalent query on https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/).

Inventors

Career context (external source, not a USPTO record): Soika's published obituary states his career "led him through tennis ball technology at Wilson, guitar construction... and many years in the medical device industry, including Abbott labs, Baxter labs, and the CEO of Criticare systems." He was born 1938-03-07 in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, held a mechanical engineering degree from Marquette and an MBA from Northwestern, and died 2026-09-11 (source: pinkardfh.com obituary). Two observations:

• Cross-company inventor career, not a fire-sale signal. He moved between Abbott, Baxter, and Criticare over a long career. There is no evidence of the "all inventors departed within 12 months of filing" pattern — and with a sole inventor who stayed on the Baxter payroll for the collection-set family, that pre-fire-sale tell is affirmatively not indicated (though I cannot date his Baxter departure).
• Non-overlapping inventor sets inside the same family. The sibling "tamper-proof cannula support assembly" line (WO 83/01901 / EP 0095477, same 1981-12-02 priority) names Brown, Homer J. Jr.; Harmon, Arlington R. Jr.; Lowe, Allen D. — a different inventive entity from Soika. So the 4,496,352 cluster is one inventor's work inside a larger Baxter 1981/1982 blood-collection filing program, not a co-inventor team.

Original assignee

Baxter Travenol Laboratories, Inc., Deerfield, Illinois (as printed on the face of the patent and confirmed in Google Patents and in sibling-family citations).

• Product-in-commerce: Yes. The patent is directed to a phlebotomy-needle hub/cover and an inline blood-sampling needle used on a donor tube attached to a blood collection bag (FIG. 1 unit 12). That is a description of Baxter's commercial blood-collection-set business — single-use donor sets and phlebotomy needles were a core Baxter Travenol product line in the early 1980s. The specification's FIG. 5 shows the hub "being held by an attendant," i.e., the disclosure is written as a production device, not a paper design.
• Primary line of business: Baxter Travenol Laboratories was a major hospital-supply and parenteral-therapy manufacturer (IV solutions, blood collection/processing, dialysis). It was formed in 1976 from the Baxter Laboratories / Travenol Laboratories combination and was publicly traded.
• Current status: Operating, under a different corporate name. Successor is Baxter International Inc. (NYSE: BAX), which Google Patents lists as "current assignee" while expressly disclaiming accuracy. The 1985‑87 period saw the Baxter Travenol → Baxter International rebranding and the American Hospital Supply acquisition; I have not verified whether any USPTO name-change or merger record against this patent exists, so treat "current owner = Baxter International" as a corporate-succession inference, not a reel/frame fact.

Relationship to the parent: the patent states on its face: "This is a continuation of application Ser. No. 326,739, filed Dec. 2, 1981, which has issued as U.S. Pat. No. 4,413,992." Same assignee path; the claim set was reworked on continuation.

Assignment timeline

No recorded assignment was retrieved for this patent, and I cannot state affirmatively that the Assignment Center holds no records — I simply could not reach the record in this session. What follows distinguishes documented facts from inference.

• No post-issuance transfer is documented anywhere I could reach. The absence of any assignment-adjacent event in the Google Patents legal-events record (which surfaces reassignment-adjacent notices and, in many patents, the change-of-name/merger chain) is weak corroboration that the patent stayed with Baxter from issue to lapse. It is not proof.
• Lead worth chasing (not a finding): Baxter-family patents of this era were prosecuted through Baxter's own counsel — e.g., the contemporaneous Baxter patent US 4,211,380 lists "Attorney, Agent, or Firm—Paul C. Flattery; Gerald S. Geren." If an assignment record exists for 4,496,352, the correspondent is plausibly a Baxter in-house attorney of that name pattern. This is an inference from a different patent's front page and is not evidence about 4,496,352's assignment correspondent.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 4496352
    1981 : Original application filed Dec 2
         : Assigned to Baxter Travenol Laboratories
    1982 : PCT counterpart filed Sep
    1983 : Continuation filed Oct 6
    1985 : Patent issued Jan 29
    1993 : Lapsed for nonpayment Jan 31
    2026 : Sole inventor died Sep 11

(The 1985‑87 Baxter Travenol → Baxter International name change is omitted deliberately: I could not verify the year or that it was recorded against this patent, and a wrong node would corrupt the chain.)

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Strongest positive finding for acquirers of dead portfolios: the maintenance-fee lapse. The 1993‑01‑31 LAPS and 1993‑04‑13 FP entries mean the patent was abandoned roughly 8 years into a 17-year term — 12 years before the post-2010 NPE assertion wave. There was no window in which this patent could have been harvested.

Verdict

Insufficient data (as the constrained-option closest fit) — and substantively, no NPE activity is evidenced at all.

Justification: I retrieved no assignment record for US 4,496,352, so I have only the original assignment-of-record to Baxter Travenol Laboratories, Inc. to work from; on that record every one of the eight NPE signals is "not present" or "no data," which is the textbook definition of the Insufficient data bucket ("no records, or only the original assignment"). The chain is not merely quiet, it is time-barred: the patent lapsed 1993‑01‑31 for failure to pay maintenance fees (LAPS 1993‑01‑31; FP 1993‑04‑13; §1.362 expiration confirmed 2018‑01‑23), roughly 15 years before the modern NPE assertion era, and the earlier section of this analysis found no litigation naming 4,496,352. If you need the verdict upgraded to a definitive "non-asserting operating-company asset," the missing link is a clean Assignment Center pull — search patent 4496352 at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ and, for the family-wide picture, pull the sibling patents sharing the 1981‑12‑02 priority: US 4,413,992 (parent), US 4,402,682 and US 4,508,534 (tamper-proof and breakable-thermal-bond lines), and US 4,574,456 (division, method). A cluster-wide transfer would have moved all of them together; if all six show as untransferred Baxter assets, the non-NPE conclusion is confirmed.

I'll verify the patent record and pull details on the cited prior art before analyzing.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 4,496,352 (Soika)

1. Record verification

I searched for the specific number 4,496,352. The record returns only US 4,496,352 A ("Cannula support assembly and its method of manufacture," Emil H. Soika, Baxter Travenol Laboratories, Inc.) — the same document as the authoritative full text supplied. No similarly-numbered record was substituted. Key data (per Google Patents, which mirrors the USPTO bibliographic record): App. No. 06/517,546, filed 1983‑10‑06, priority 1981‑12‑02 from Ser. No. 06/326,739 (parent issued as US 4,413,992), granted 1985‑01‑29, now Expired – Fee Related (lapsed 1993).

Honest limits on this exercise. The Google Patents citation tables and the specification's own "Description of the Prior Art" agree on the identity of the core references, but I was not able to pull the full text of every one of the 55 documents listed in the citation table. Descriptions below are grounded on (a) the patent's own characterization of each reference, (b) titles/dates/assignees in the citation table, and (c) full-text retrieval I did obtain for Walter 2,702,037, Pagones 3,523,530, Geiger 4,121,588 and US 4,091,811. Where I could not verify a document's disclosure, I say so. Treat the § 102 mapping as an analytical screen, not a certified anticipation opinion.

Two record discrepancies worth flagging (per the "interpret literally / flag contradictions" rule):

• The specification cites a cover-art reference as "Brookfield 3,294,089, December 27, 1966." The PTO citation table contains no 3,294,089; it instead lists US 3,367,331 A (Brookfield), "Device for locking a hypodermic needle hub to a syringe," filed 1965‑04‑07, issued 1968‑02‑06. These may be two different Brookfield patents, or the specification's number/date may be oblique. I cannot reconcile them from the fetched record.
• The specification cites "Melton 2,705,008, March 29, 1955," but the PTO table attributes US 2,705,008 to Morton Newburger ("Medication cartridge-needle-needle guard unit for hypodermic syringe"). Same number/date, different named inventor.
• The citation table's first entry, "US 28,713 A, 1860‑06‑12" (assignee garbled as "dtlrkee"), appears to be a data artifact; the reissue actually relied on US RE 28,713 E (Stevens et al., Sherwood Medical), which is separately listed.

2. Legal frame

Priority is 1981‑12‑02, so pre‑AIA § 102/§ 103 governs. The § 102(b) critical date is 1980‑12‑02 (one year before the effective U.S. filing date). References published after that date cannot be § 102(b) art and must be assessed under § 102(a)/(e) (filing-date-based) or § 103.

Claim 1 is the only independent claim. Its distinguishing requirement is structural: a first member with a bore occupied by a second member only in part, the needle end of the second member being recessed/confined in that bore, and the cover's inner member protruding end removably engaging in the remaining unoccupied portion of the first member bore in an interference fit. That "leftover bore" limitation is what the FIG. 2–5 phlebotomy embodiment does not practice.

3. The references, by the specification's own three groups

Group A — "Cannula support members, or hubs" (Cited in the specification)

Group B — "Cover members, or sheaths" (Cited in the specification)

Group C — Foreign documents cited

4. Additional documents in the PTO citation table (not discussed in the specification)

The citation table lists 55 documents; the specification discusses only ~22. The ~33 additional records were of record in the file. The ones with genuine bearing on this disclosure:

• US 4,091,811 Baxter Travenol, "Needle cover," filed 1976‑11‑15, issued 1978‑05‑30 — verified in part: it expressly cites Pagones 3,523,530 as prior art and describes a needle cover "compris[ing] a first sleeve positioned about a pointed hypodermic needle," where the sheath "is formed integrally with the hub, being connected thereto by a thin, frangible ring of plastic." Same assignee, same problem, closest corporate prior art. Bearing on C1/C3; lacks the two-part hub-with-remainder-bore structure.
• US 4,078,565 Abbott, "Readily activated hypodermic syringe," filed 1976‑10‑04, issued 1978‑03‑14 — needle-cover packaging art.
• US 4,193,399 Travenol, "Self venting plug for venous entry unit," filed 1977‑07‑08, issued 1980‑03‑18 — venting/plug technology; relevant to C3 (plug) and to the gas-sterilization variant.
• US 4,227,527 De Frank et al., Baxter Travenol, "Sterile air vent," filed 1978‑10‑23, issued 1980‑10‑14 — expressly incorporated by the specification as the microporous-plug (POREX/sintered polyethylene) teaching; directly underlies the C3 plug and the gas-sterilization embodiments.
• US 4,201,406 and US 4,326,518 (Baxter Travenol) — "Spike connector for solution bag" (1980‑05‑06) and "Separable integral donor connector with manual clamping means" (filed 1980‑04‑07, issued 1982‑04‑27) — the latter is the separable-connector/clamping technology behind the FIG. 1 sampling setup (sealer clip 90 / hemostat 92), relevant to C2.
• US 3,668,650 (Burron, "Syringe and needle adapter assembly and method of making same," 1972‑02‑01) and US 3,640,275 (Burron, "Intravenous needle assembly," 1972‑02‑08) — two-piece adapter/hub assembly art; relevant to C1/C7.
• US 3,667,247 (Sherwood, "Needle cap for syringe package," 1972‑07‑18), US 3,820,652 (Thackston, "Packaged syringe construction," 1974‑06‑28), US 3,889,673 (Survival Technology, "Tip assembly for syringes," 1975‑06‑17), US 3,434,473 (Ciba‑Geigy, "Hypodermic needle unit with integral needle guard," 1969‑03‑25), US 3,367,488 (Pharmaseal, "Hypodermic syringe package," 1968‑02‑06) — needle-guard/cap art bearing on the cover side of C1.
• US 3,662,457 (MPL, "Method of forming bevel oriented needle arrangement," 1972‑05‑16) — bevel-orientation manufacturing art; the specification reports ±10° bevel alignment, but no claim recites bevel orientation.
• US 777,065 (Boardman, sewing-machine needle), US 1,057,860 (Sampson, "Method of forming needles"), US 3,227,121 (Torrington, sewing-machine needles) — cited for needle-forming/bevel geometry; no claim impact.
• US 2,674,265, US 2,866,457, US 2,955,595 (cited of record inside Pagones 3,523,530, not in this patent's table) — not this patent's art.
• US 2,689,562 / 2,689,563 (Becton Dickinson donor/donor-set), US 2,717,982, US 2,794,435, US 2,847,995, US 2,847,994, US 2,902,995, US 2,949,913, US 3,043,304, US 3,073,307, US 3,127,892, US 3,196,872, US 3,217,710, US 3,342,179, US 4,178,930 — blood-handling/needle-hub/sheath art, all published before the critical date; general background, none showing the C1 "remaining bore" coupling.

Not prior art. US 4,413,992 (the parent, Soika/Baxter Travenol, 1983‑11‑08) is a continuation-parent sharing the identical disclosure and the same inventive entity/applicant. It is not "by another" under § 102(a)/(e), and it issued after the effective filing date, so it is not § 102(b) art against US 4,496,352. Similarly, the forward "Cited By" documents (e.g., Sherwood US 5,085,647, "Rigid needle cover with needle sealing plug and method of manufacture thereof," 1992; Fenwal US 8,323,251 / 8,870,828, "Phlebotomy needle assembly and frangible cover"; JPS 58‑502035 / US 4,402,682 "Tamper-proof cannula support assembly," which expressly cites the Soika application) post-date this patent and are citations of it, not prior art against it.

5. Bottom line on anticipation

• No single cited reference appears to anticipate claim 1 as a whole. Every candidate (Pagones 3,523,530; Walter 2,702,037; Geiger 4,121,588; Gewecke 2,712,822; Baxter's own US 4,091,811) discloses a needle hub plus a removable cover, but none discloses (i) a first member whose bore is occupied by a second member only in part, with the needle-carrying end confined/recessed, and (ii) a cover inner member whose protruding end removably engages in the remaining unoccupied portion of that same first-member bore in an interference fit.
• Most relevant art, ranked: ① Pagones US 3,523,530 (tip-sealing chamber + drag-reducing enlarged chamber + inline sampling variant); ② Walter US 2,702,037 (hub for flexible tubing + removable, closed-end sheath); ③ Geiger US 4,121,588 (frictional/interference skirt coupling over a hub); ④ Baxter's own US 4,091,811 and US 4,078,565 (needle covers); ⑤ Gewecke US 2,712,822 (hub for flexible tubing).
• Where the dependent claims would actually be attacked: C1/C4/C7 by Pagones+Geiger; C3 by De Frank US 4,227,527 (plug) and Walter's sealed sheath end; claims 5, 6, 8 and 9 appear to carry the real novelty, because the cited art is uniformly molded (Pagones one-piece thermoplastic housing; Geiger thermoplastic shield; Walter molded hub), whereas those claims require generally uniform cross-section + extrusion.
• Timing caveats: Akhavi US 4,240,427 (1980‑12‑23) and Blum US 4,266,543 (1981‑05‑12) post-date the 1980‑12‑02 critical date and are § 102(a)/(e)‑only references; they cannot be § 102(b) art.
• Unverified items (Italian 498,057; German 664,001; Australian 159,814; Oiwa 4,180,071; and the Brookfield number discrepancy) should be examined against their full texts or the USPTO file wrapper before being relied upon in any invalidity position.

I'll ground the analysis by pulling details on the key cited references before building the § 103 combinations.

Now the needle-protector and plug references, plus the Baxter needle-cover and vent-plug art.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 4,496,352 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Analysis runs from the patent's own "Description of the Prior Art" section and the face-of-patent citation list (55 references). It builds on the claim chart already prepared and does not repeat it.

1. Framework and the person of ordinary skill

Governing test. Because the effective filing/priority date is 1981‑12‑02 (pre‑AIA), the ordinary‑skill level and the "prior art" universe are fixed as of that date. The substantive standard is Graham v. John Deere as refined by KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc.: scope/content of the art, differences from the claims, PHOSITA level, and secondary considerations; and an improvement is obvious where a known technique is applied to a known device to yield predictable results, or where the combination is "the product… of ordinary creativity, not of a genius."

PHOSITA profile. A person of ordinary skill here is a medical‑device design engineer with a bachelor's degree (or equivalent) and roughly two to four years' experience in disposable blood‑handling apparatus — intravenous/blood‑bag sets, needle hubs, sheaths and connectors — familiar with polyvinyl‑chloride extrusion, solvent/heat bonding, friction ("interference") fits, and ethylene‑oxide and autoclave sterilization. Critically, the patent itself supplies this profile: it recites as known "ram or screw extrusion techniques," interference/slip fits, solvent and heat bonding, autoclaving, and gas sterilization with a microporous plug. Those admissions are treated as Applicant Admitted Prior Art (AAPA) and are directly usable in a § 103 combination.

Important procedural caveat. These same references appear to have been before the examiner — the specification lists them and they appear in the "Citations (55)" table of the record. That cuts both ways: the examiner evidently found something in claim 1 that these references did not teach. But the examiner's allowance does not foreclose a § 103 challenge built on new combinations of those references (and combinations with the AAPA), which is the exercise below. I should also flag that I was able to verify the substantive disclosures of only a subset of the cited references (see § 6).

2. What the prior art actually discloses (grounded)

I verified the following from the reference texts:

Grouped per the patent's own taxonomy: Walter, Gewecke and Pagones are the flexible‑tubing‑attachment hub references; Wedig, Walter, Melton, Brookfield, Pagones, Geiger and Oiwa are the cover/sheath references; and Akhavi and Blum are the protection/alignment references.

3. Claim 1 — the combination grounds

Claim 1's structure (hub: first member bore + second member occupying only a portion of that bore, needle end recessed and projecting beyond the first‑member bore; cover: outer member + inner member whose protruding end engages in an interference fit within the remaining, unoccupied portion of the first‑member bore) is the point of novelty. Three overlapping grounds attack it.

Ground A — Pagones '530 in view of Gewecke '822

• Pagones supplies the hub‑plus‑cover subassembly on flexible tubing, the tubular adapter secured to the cannula, the hub section that receives and locks the adapter in a bore via spaced shoulders, and — decisively — the inline sampling‑needle variant.
• Gewecke supplies exactly the concentric, nested tubular hub: an outer tubular body with an internal bore‑like space and an inner tubular portion that holds the needle, the outer space receiving tubing. This is structurally the claim‑1 "first member bore / second member" relationship, and the reverse of the cover's "outer member / inner member" nesting.
• Difference vs. claim 1: Pagones' protector is a frangible one‑piece extension that breaks off (not re‑attachable), and its engagement is with the adapter, not by plugging into a leftover bore portion.
• Motivation to combine: Gewecke and Pagones are in the same field (blood‑set needle hubs coupling a cannula to flexible PVC tubing), address the same problem (leak‑tight, low‑cost hub), and come from the same industry lineage (Baxter/Fenwal/American Hospital Supply). A PHOSITA desiring a re‑usable, re‑attachable cover instead of Pagones' destroy‑on‑use frangible housing would predictably adopt Gewecke's two‑member nested tubular hub and fit the cover over/into the resulting outer body. KSR: "a patent composed of several elements is not proved obvious merely by demonstrating that each of its elements was independently known" — but here the elements are not merely known, they are known to work together (both are tubing‑coupled needle hubs), so the combination is a predictable use of prior‑art elements according to their established functions.

Ground B — Pagones '530 (or Walter '037) in view of Akhavi '427

• Akhavi supplies the removable protector held to the needle hub by a wedging (friction/interference) fit with bottoming shoulders, plus vent ribs to admit sterilizing gas — i.e., the "removably engageable in an interference fit" limitation in functional terms.
• Motivation to combine: Pagones' stated aim is preserving sterile integrity; Akhavi supplies a manipulable, re‑attachable protector and a gas‑sterilization path. A PHOSITA seeking a cover that "can be easily removed and returned" (an express object of the patent‑in‑suit, and the very problem Akhavi addresses) would combine Akhavi's hub‑engaging protector with Pagones' tubing hub. The only remaining question is where the protector engages — Akhavi on the hub exterior, claim 1 inside the hub bore — and moving a friction engagement from the hub's outer surface to its internal bore is, at most, a predictable design choice among a finite number of known alternatives (KSR; also the "simple substitution of one known element for another to obtain a predictable result").

Ground C — Gewecke '822 + Walter '037 (with Akhavi/Blum for coverability)

• Walter pairs a tubing‑coupled needle hub with a sleeve sheath, and its sheath is described as closed (pinched/sealed) at one end — the structural antecedent to the closed cover of dependent claims 2–3.
• Adding Gewecke's inner/outer tubular construction yields the nested hub/cover geometry of claim 1; Blum supplies the explicit teaching of a cover mounted on and slidable relative to the hub. Motivation: to render the cover removable/returnable while preserving the tubing coupling and the sterile seal.

4. Dependent claims 2–9

Takeaway on the dependent claims: claims 4, 5, 7 and 8 are essentially structural restatements of Gewecke's nested tubular hub, and claims 6 and 9 rest exclusively on the applicant's own admission that extrusion is a known technique. None of claims 2–9 adds a limitation that is not either taught by Pagones/Gewecke/Walter or conceded as conventional in the specification. Claims 2–9 therefore rise or fall largely with claim 1 plus routine engineering.

5. Secondary considerations and the counter‑case

No record‑based secondary considerations. The record shows no evidence of commercial success with nexus, copying, licensing, or industry praise tied to these claims; the patent lapsed 1993‑01‑31 for non‑payment of maintenance fees and was never litigated (per the earlier sections). The "Cited By" list (e.g., Fenwal's later frangible‑cover phlebotomy patents, US 8,323,251) shows continued industry activity in the field but establishes no nexus to the claims here.

The best nonobviousness arguments:

1. Claim 1's specific architecture is genuinely narrow. No single verified reference shows a needle‑carrying inner member recessed so that only a portion of the outer hub bore is occupied, with the cover's protruding inner member plugging into the remaining bore. Pagones' engagement is external (shoulders/adapter), Akhavi's is on the hub's outer surface, and Gewecke's inner portion is a hub component, not a cover component. The examiner appears to have allowed over exactly this distinction.
2. Possible teaching away in Pagones. Pagones' one‑piece housing is deliberately frangible and tamper‑evident — arguably directing away from a re‑usable, re‑attachable cover. But this is weak: Pagones does not disparage re‑coverability, and Akhavi/Blum/Walter supply re‑attachable covers in the same field, so the "all references… point in a different direction" standard for teaching away is not met.
3. Hindsight risk. Reaching claim 1's exact bore‑within‑bore engagement requires selecting and re‑arranging features from several references; a rigorous KSR analysis must show the articulated reason to modify, not just the elements' presence.

Assessed bottom line. Claim 1 is the only claim with a colorable nonobviousness position, and even it is weakly to moderately vulnerable under Grounds A–C, chiefly because (a) Pagones and Gewecke are same‑field, same‑problem tubing‑coupled hub references, and (b) the claimed fit is an interference fit the specification concedes is conventional. Claims 2–9 are more clearly obvious, since they map onto Gewecke's nested tubular structure, Pagones' inline sampling configuration, Walter's closed sheath/plug, and the patent's own admissions regarding extrusion and uniform cross‑section.

6. Verification limits and caveats

• I verified the substance of Pagones '530, Gewecke '822, Akhavi '427, Walter '037 and Blum '426,543. I was not able to retrieve and verify the disclosures of the remaining cited references — notably US 4,097,181 ("Needle cover," Baxter Travenol, 1978), US 4,193,399 ("Self‑venting plug for venous entry unit," Travenol, 1980), US 4,192,305 (Seberg), US 4,180,071 (Oiwa), US 3,523,530's siblings, and the foreign documents (British 810,860 / 840,487; Canadian 545,415; German 664,001 and Auslegeschrift 1,085,652; Italian 498,057). Arguments resting on those references are therefore less fully supported and should be re‑verified before being relied on. Where I have asserted their relevance (e.g., the vented/microporous plug), I am relying on the patent's own characterization and on the general state of the art, not on reading their texts.
• The parent, US 4,413,992, is not usable prior art against these claims (same inventive entity; this patent is its continuation), so it supplies no § 103 reference even though its disclosure is identical.
• Nothing in the record shows this patent was ever asserted or challenged; no actual § 103 adjudication exists. This analysis is a retrospective, hypothetical construction, and reasonable examiners/adjudicators could reach a contrary conclusion on claim 1 given the narrowness identified above.

Conclusion: Under § 103, claims 2–9 are likely invalid as obvious over the cited art and the applicant's own admissions, and claim 1 is vulnerable to at least Ground A (Pagones '530 + Gewecke '822) and Ground B (Pagones + Akhavi), though its unusually specific "remaining portion of the bore" architecture gives it the only defensible nonobviousness story and could survive on that narrow ground.