US 5033252

I'll search for the specific patent number to check for any current litigation or docket activity.

Let me run a couple more targeted searches to check for any litigation or appellate docket activity.

US 5,033,252 A — Search Results Summary

Important caveat first: I ran web searches (Google Patents, uspto.report, EveryPatent, Justia and general web). I did not have direct query access to PACER/CAFC docket systems or to USPTO Patent Center's litigation/assignment APIs, so my statement below about litigation is based on the absence of any hits, not on a definitive docket check. I found no CAFC 2026 docket activity, no district court case, no IPR/PGR, and no reexamination referencing 5,033,252. That is consistent with the patent's status: it expired in 2008, long before any 2026 docket could realistically involve it. I am flagging this explicitly rather than asserting a negative as verified fact.

Bibliographic data

Continuation chain (per the specification): this application is a continuation of Ser. No. 07/273,605 (filed 1988-11-21, issued as US 4,947,620), which is itself a continuation of Ser. No. 07/137,436 (filed 1987-12-23, issued as US 4,805,377). All three share the same title and the 1987-12-23 priority date.

Assignment chain (per Google Patents' reassignment record): Entravision, Inc. → Allergan Medical Optics (1992-04-10) → Allergan, Inc. / Allergan Medical Optics (1995-08-11) → Advanced Medical Optics, Inc. (2004-06-22), with Bank of America security interests recorded in 2002 and 2004 and released in 2007. Google Patents currently lists the assignee as Johnson and Johnson Surgical Vision Inc (a downstream successor to the AMO line).

Minor discrepancy to note: a Justia citation table (in US 8,865,232) renders the 1991 entry as "Carter et al.," whereas Google Patents lists a single inventor, Douglas V. Carter. The Google Patents bibliographic record and the patent text are the more authoritative of the two here; I'd treat "et al." as a citation-table artifact, but I have not seen the printed face of the patent to confirm.

Abstract (as published)

"A method of filling, sealing and sterilizing a pharmaceutical package including a polypropylene bottle containing a balanced salt solution includes the steps of filling each bottle to maximum capacity to exclude residual air, the introduction of a silicone rubber gasket into the bottle cap to absorb pressure and prevent leakage during a steam sterilization procedure, and the enclosure of the filled bottles in a blister pack before steam sterilizing. The blister packs have Tyvek™ lids and are placed blister-side-up during the sterilization process to eliminate deformation of the blister during sterilization. Maximum filling of the bottle with liquid and the substantial elimination of air prevents dimpling of the bottle."

Technical problem addressed

The pre-existing art used low-density polyethylene squeeze bottles (m.p. ≈100 °C) that cannot withstand 121 °C heat sterilization, so they were aseptically filled and then terminally sterilized with ethylene oxide. Because polyethylene is permeable to EtO, residual gas reacted in the saline to form ethylene glycol and ethylene chlorhydrin — undesirable irritants in ophthalmic/surgical irrigation fluids. The '252 patent replaces this with a steam (autoclave) sterilization process built around a clarified polypropylene bottle, with process adaptations to survive 121 °C.

Independent claim

There is exactly one independent claim — claim 1 (claims 2–11 are all dependent). In plain language, claim 1 covers a method of preparing and sterilizing a pharmaceutical package comprising a squeeze-type bottle of a selected pharmaceutical liquid, with these steps:

1. (a) Fill to capacity — fill a resilient polymeric bottle with the pharmaceutical product until completely full, eliminating residual air in the bottle body and neck. The bottle material must (i) withstand sterilizing temperatures without deforming and (ii) be substantially vapor-impermeable through its wall (i.e., a barrier to sterilant ingress/egress).
2. (b) Insert the cannula adapter — push a plug-type adapter into the neck while displacing the excess liquid, keeping the bottle completely full; the adapter is of the type used to connect the package to a cannula or similar medical apparatus.
3. (c) Cap and seal — cap the bottle, with a seal provided between the inner face of the cap's top wall and the bottle rim, to absorb pressure from bottle expansion and prevent cap/bottle deformation and leakage during sterilization.
4. (d) Blister-pack it — place the bottle in an individual blister pack of a polymeric material suitable for a sterilization procedure, and seal the open side with a non-woven textile lid that is permeable and remains sealed to the blister polymer through sterilization.
5. (e) Sterilize the resulting package.

Note the deliberate functional/result-oriented drafting in step (a) ("will withstand sterilizing temperatures without deforming," "substantially no leakage of vapor through the wall") rather than a hard recitation of "polypropylene" — the specific materials appear only in the dependent claims.

Dependent claims at a glance (for context on scope)

• 2 – translucent bottle; 3 – polypropylene bottle; 4/5 – cap of the same material / polypropylene cap; 6 – silicone rubber washer in the cap; 7 – polycarbonate blister; 8/9 – pre-applied printed polyester label, extending no more than two-thirds around the bottle circumference; 10 – packages placed blister-side-up in a wire mesh sterilizing tray so the bottle is supported by the non-woven lid rather than the blister polymer; 11 – the sterilization is steam sterilization.

These track the specification's stated innovations: the silicone gasket to absorb expansion/contraction pressure, the two-thirds-maximum polyester label applied ≥24 h before filling, and the "zone-coated" (not fully coated) Tyvek™ lid combined with blister-side-up orientation in a wire mesh tray.

Claims-adjacent classification detail

EveryPatent lists the issued classification as PACKAGE MAKING : METHODS : Sterilizing complete package : For preformed receptacle with separate closure, and Google Patents gives CPC B65B55/02 (sterilizing complete packages), B65B11/52, B65D75/32 and B65D75/36.

Confidence and limitations

• High confidence on title, numbers, dates, inventor, abstract, claim 1 text, continuation chain and the 2008-07-23 expiration — all read directly from the Google Patents full text and corroborated by uspto.report/EveryPatent.
• Moderate confidence on the current assignee line; the recorded security-interest and release documents I saw are real, but I did not verify the Abbott → J&J Surgical Vision transfer from a primary assignment record.
• Low/negative confidence on litigation: I found nothing, but I did not execute an authoritative CAFC or PACER docket query. Given the 2008 expiration and 17-year-from-issue term (pre-URAA filing), an active 2026 appeal involving the '252 patent would be highly improbable, but I cannot certify a true negative from the tools used here.

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5033252/en ; https://uspto.report/patent/grant/5033252 ; http://www.everypatent.com/comp/pat5033252.html

I'll search for litigation involving US Patent 5,033,252.

Bottom line

I could not find any litigation — district court, Federal Circuit, ITC, or PTAB — in which US Patent 5,033,252 was asserted, challenged, or otherwise at issue. No case found in which Entravision, Inc., Allergan Medical Optics, Advanced Medical Optics, or Johnson & Johnson Surgical Vision asserted this patent, and no case found in which it was asserted against any of them.

Because I could not complete a full docket-level verification (see "Verification limits" below), the accurate statement is: no litigation is known to be associated with this specific patent on the basis of the searches performed, not a categorical assertion that none has ever existed.

Case-by-case results

1. Cases directly involving US 5,033,252

None found. Case list: empty.

2. Adjacent litigation found (NOT about the '252 patent — flagged for context only)

The only litigation surfaced involving the original assignee, Entravision, Inc., is:

• Alcon Laboratories, Inc. v. Entravision, Inc.
  • Court: U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, reported at 976 F.2d 748 (Fed. Cir. 1992), 26 USPQ2d 1137 (also indexed as [1992] USCAFED 562).
  • Roles: Alcon = plaintiff/appellant; Entravision = defendant/appellee.
  • Asserted patent: the opinion refers to Alcon's "'432 patent" (and refers separately to a "'423" reference and to "'423 co-inventor Dr. Roehrs"). I did not independently verify the issuing number, and I am not auto-correcting it to any number I may recall. It is not US 5,033,252.
  • Subject matter: Alcon had to prove Entravision's accused process met every limitation of claim 1 of the '432 patent literally or equivalently. Alcon conceded no literal infringement on appeal; the sole issue was infringement under the doctrine of equivalents.
  • Outcome: Summary judgment of non-infringement in favor of Entravision affirmed. Alcon's equivalency case was held to be conclusory attorney argument ("a 'way' analysis ... devoid of support from any evidence"), and the court noted that raising a genuine issue on a single claim step is insufficient where other limitations are not met.
  • Filing date and district court case number/docket: Not verified. The sources retrieved give the appellate citation only. I would need PACER or a docket database to supply the district court, docket number, and complaint filing date.
  • Relevance to US 5,033,252: Same patent owner in the same technology space (ophthalmic/surgical irrigation solutions), but it is not litigation over the '252 patent. Entravision was the defendant there, not the plaintiff.

3. Related patents in the same family (for scoping, not litigation)

US 5,033,252 is the third member of a continuation chain, all from the 1987-12-23 priority date and all originally assigned to Entravision, Inc.:

• US 4,805,377 — "Method of packaging and sterilizing a pharmaceutical product" (issued 1989-02-21)
• US 4,947,620 — same title (issued 1990-08-14); the '252 application is a continuation of application Ser. No. 07/273,605, which issued as the '620 patent
• US 5,033,252 — same title (issued 1991-07-23); application Ser. No. 07/559,340, filed 1990-07-30
• US 4,962,856 and US 5,052,558 — "Packaged pharmaceutical product" / "Sealable container for packaging medical articles in sterile condition," same family and priority date

I performed no separate litigation check on the sibling patents; only the '252 patent was within the scope of your request.

4. Ownership chain relevant to enforceability (from the Google Patents record)

• Original assignee: Entravision Inc
• 1992-04-10: assigned to Allergan Medical Optics
• 1995-08-11: assigned to Allergan, Inc. (Allergan Medical Optics)
• 2004-06-22: assigned to Advanced Medical Optics, Inc.
• Current assignee listed: Johnson and Johnson Surgical Vision Inc
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime, with "Anticipated expiration" recorded 2008-07-23

The '252 patent thus entered the public domain around July 2008. Any action on the patent would have had to be filed before that date, which dramatically narrows the window.

False positives I deliberately excluded

Per your instruction not to return results for similar numbers, these appeared in searches and are not US Patent 5,033,252:

• Brazilian court docket 5033252-77.2024.4.03.6100 (13ª Vara Federal Cível, São Paulo) — this is a Brazilian judicial case number, not a US patent. Docket and patent numbers occupy different namespaces.
• IPR petitions citing "11,012,252" (e.g., Amphenol Corp. v. Credo Semiconductor, E.D. Tex. Nos. 2:25-cv-00296, 2:25-cv-00297, 2:25-cv-00298; D. Del. No. 1:25-cv-00316; ITC No. 337-TA-3814) — U.S. Patent 11,012,252 is a different patent (active Ethernet cables), not 5,033,252.
• Pantech v. OnePlus (E.D. Tex., Texarkana Division) — asserted patents include U.S. 9,063,654; 8,893,052; 11,012,954; 9,548,839; 10,869,247. The "'052" shorthand refers to the '052 patent, not the '252 patent.
• NK 5033252 — a Comline aftermarket tie-rod-end part number, not a patent.
• US 5,052,558 — a sibling family member. Distinct patent; not to be confused with 5,033,252.
• Numerous non-US patent specifications (EP 3,542,800 B1; EP 4,455,145 A2; EP 1,635,824 B1; RU 2,575,833 C2) that merely cite US 5,033,252 as prior art or incorporate it by reference. Citation in another patent is not litigation.

Verification limits (please read before relying on the "none found" answer)

1. Source coverage. The searches covered general web indices, Google Patents, Justia, USPTO PTACTS petition documents, CourtListener/recap materials, and Federal Circuit opinion databases (openjurist, WorldLII, SAFLII). I was not able to run a direct query against the Unified Patents litigation portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) before exhausting my available search steps, and PACER / Docket Navigator / Lex Machina are paywalled.
2. Structural reason for the null result. US 5,033,252 claims a method of manufacturing/packaging (filling to capacity, inserting a cannula adapter, capping with a pressure-absorbing seal, blister packaging, sterilizing). Process patents of this kind are typically practiced inside an accused infringer's factory, which makes them hard to detect and comparatively rarely asserted. Combined with expiration in July 2008, a total absence of reported litigation is unsurprising.
3. Docket-level caveat. District court complaints are not always indexed in free web sources, particularly for cases from the early 1990s. A negative result from web search is weak evidence of absence for that era.
4. Recommended next steps if you need a defensible clearance. Search PACER for Entravision, Allergan Medical Optics, Allergan, Advanced Medical Optics, and Johnson & Johnson Surgical Vision as parties; run the patent number through Unified Patents' litigation and PTAB portals, Docket Navigator, and Lex Machina; check the USPTO Patent Center file wrapper for the '252 patent as well as the sibling patents for any Rule 11 / litigation-related papers; and check the ITC EDIS database for Section 337 investigations involving ophthalmic irrigation or balanced salt solution products.
5. No fabrication. I have not supplied a case number, filing date, or jurisdiction for a '252 patent suit because I found no case to attach them to. The district court docket details for Alcon v. Entravision are likewise marked unverified rather than inferred.

I'll verify the structured data against public sources before drafting.

Initial searches returned only unrelated '252 patents and citation noise. Let me run targeted checks.

No PTAB hits so far — only unrelated patents and citation noise. Two more checks: litigation history that might have spawned an IPR, and whether the sibling patents drew challenges.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 5,033,252: 0. Breakdown: 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO ODP) returns nothing, and every web-search angle I ran — IPR/PGR/CBM queries, petitioner-name queries, sibling-patent queries, and docket/litigation queries — surfaced no PTAB filing on this patent. The bottom line for a defendant is not "the patent is hardened" and not "the claims are canceled" — it is that this patent has been expired since 2008-07-23, before AIA trials existed, and it cannot support an infringement demand at all today. The absence of PTAB activity here is a timing artifact, not a signal of patent strength.

Findings (no proceedings to detail)

The requested per-proceeding format has nothing to populate. I am recording that explicitly rather than inventing docket numbers:

• No IPR, PGR, or CBM on US 5,033,252. Verified against the canonical ODP block and against targeted searches. No hits.
• No Federal Circuit appeal of any PTAB decision, because there was no PTAB decision. No CAFC docket exists for this patent's PTAB proceedings.
• No known reexamination or reissue. The patent issues as US 5,033,252 A with no B1/B2 certificate indicating a reexamination or reissue in which claims were altered (Google Patents record).

Why the "no PTAB activity" result is real and not a search gap

Three independent structural reasons confirm the null result:

1. The patent expired before the AIA trial regime existed. PTAB IPR/PGR/CBM practice began 2012-09-16. US 5,033,252's anticipated expiration is 2008-07-23 (17-year pre-URAA term from the 1991-07-23 grant; Google Patents lists it as "Expired – Lifetime" with an anticipated expiration of 2008-07-23). Any would-be petitioner's window opened four years after the patent died. Confirmed at Google Patents and RPX Insight ("Expired due to Term").
2. PGR is categorically unavailable. Post-grant review reaches only first-inventor-to-file patents. This is a pre-AIA patent with a 1987-12-23 priority date and a 1990-07-30 filing date — the chain is US 07/137,436 (now US 4,805,377) → US 07/273,605 (now US 4,947,620) → US 07/559,340 (this patent).
3. CBM is inapplicable. The claims recite a method of filling, capping, blister-packaging and steam-sterilizing a squeeze-type pharmaceutical bottle (claims 1-11). That is not "used in the practice, administration, or management of a financial product or service."

⚠️ Number-collision trap — do not auto-correct into the wrong patent

Searches for "the '252 patent" and "IPR2025-00834" return a completely unrelated active PTAB proceeding about an active Ethernet cable patent that issued 2021-05-18, with Amphenol and Credo as parties and § 103 grounds over Lugthart-993 and Aronson. That is not US 5,033,252 and has nothing to do with Entravision, Allergan, Johnson & Johnson Surgical Vision, or pharmaceutical packaging. Likewise, the hundreds of "Cited By" entries under US 5,033,252 (Araxes/KRAS, Pharmacyclics/BTK, TissueTech, etc.) are later patents merely citing this one as background art — they are not proceedings against it. Confirm identity by patent number and priority date before relying on anything returned by these keyword searches.

Defensive value (single-entry equivalent)

• Assertion posture: US 5,033,252 expired 2008-07-23. Under 35 U.S.C. § 271, no act after that date can infringe it, and under § 286 damages reach back only six years from suit — meaning the last date on which any recoverable damages could have accrued was approximately 2014-07-23. As of today (2026-09-29), the recovery window is closed by roughly twelve years. A demand letter citing claims 1-11 of this patent is not merely weak; it is meritless, and unreasonable assertion of an expired patent is a Rule 11 / § 285 risk.
• The claims remain textually intact — claims 1-11 were never canceled, amended, or narrowed by any PTAB, reexam, or reissue. Do not mistake that for strength: they are intact only because the patent died before anyone could challenge them.

The one theoretical avenue, and why it is not practical

IPR is not, strictly speaking, limited to unexpired patents — the Board has instituted on patents that expired during pendency, and § 311 speaks only of "a patent." So a petition is not jurisdictionally barred. But: (a) there is no infringement exposure to negate, which destroys the petitioner's practical motivation and invites discretionary denial; (b) the Board would still need to construe expired claims under the Phillips framework while claims of an expired patent are generally construed by their ordinary meaning at expiration; and (c) no petitioner has ever bothered. Treat "file an IPR" as a non-strategy here.

Strategic summary

Claim status. All eleven claims of US 5,033,252 are UNTESTED — none canceled, none sustained after challenge, none narrowed. Claim 1 (the filling → adapter-insertion → silicone-gasket capping → polycarbonate-blister/Tyvek-lid packaging → sterilization method), claims 2-7 and 11 (dependent: translucent bottle, polypropylene bottle, same-material cap, polypropylene cap, silicone rubber washer, polycarbonate blister, steam sterilization) and claims 8-9 and 10 (polyester label ≤ two-thirds circumference; blister-side-up in wire-mesh tray) all stand exactly as granted — but expired. The useful framing for a defendant is not "which claims survive" but "no claim can be infringed, because the term ended 2008-07-23."

Estoppel landscape. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel of any kind, because no IPR was ever instituted on this patent. That cuts both ways. It means no prior-art ground is foreclosed to anyone — but it also means there is no FWD to lean on. Your invalidity defense is not an IPR-estoppel play; it is the simpler, dispositive § 271/§ 286 expiration defense, plus judicial notice of the file wrapper. If you ever did need art, the full field of pre-1987-12-23 references remains available in district court under §§ 102/103, unconstrained by any Board proceeding.

Pattern signals. No repeat petitioner, no patent owner PTAB appeals, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents or similar) anywhere in the chain. The ownership history — Entravision, Inc. → Allergan Medical Optics (1992-04-10) → Allergan, Inc. (1995-08-11) → Advanced Medical Optics (2004-06-22), with the Google Patents record listing the current assignee as Johnson & Johnson Surgical Vision Inc — reflects corporate M&A in the ophthalmic surgical space, not enforcement activity. The family's three patents (US 4,805,377, US 4,947,620, US 5,033,252) share the 1987-12-23 priority date and the same expired status.

Recommended next steps

1. Lead with expiration, not validity. Confirm the 2008-07-23 expiration and the resulting closed § 286 window, then treat any infringement demand on this patent as unsupportable. There is no FWD to link to, because no PTAB proceeding exists — say that plainly and cite the authoritative records instead: Google Patents US5033252A and RPX Insight US5033252A.
2. Verify independently in PTAB E2E and the assignment record before relying on this memo in correspondence: PTAB E2E / PTAB Center search, and the USPTO Patent Center / Assignment records linked from the patent's Google Patents page. I checked the ODP structured block (canonical, shows zero) plus open-web searches; I did not have live API access to PTAB E2E in this session, so treat that as the one remaining confirmation step.
3. If opposing counsel insists a proceeding exists, demand the proceeding number and check the priority date before conceding anything — the most likely error is confusion with the unrelated 2021-issued '252 patent in IPR2025-00834 (active Ethernet cable, Amphenol/Credo). That proceeding will not help you and will not bind anyone here.
4. Preserve the null result. Because the patent expired just as the AIA trial regime was still four years away, there will never be a PTAB proceeding worth waiting for. Do not advise a client to "wait for an IPR" on this patent. There is nothing to wait for.

Confidence note: High confidence that US 5,033,252 has no AIA trial proceedings, on the basis of the ODP block plus convergent structural reasoning (pre-AIA, expired 2008-07-23, non-CBM subject matter) and negative search results. I found no evidence of a reexamination or reissue either; that finding rests on the absence of a B1/B2 certificate in the patent record rather than on a file-wrapper pull, so verify in Patent Center if it matters.

I'll try to pull the recorded assignment data from the USPTO-facing mirrors before writing up the chain.

Let me try the specific assignment-record mirrors and the reel/frame data.

Data-retrieval caveat (read before the timeline)

I could not obtain reel/frame numbers or correspondent-of-record fields for this patent. The USPTO Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) and its predecessor at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html are JavaScript-driven search applications; my search tools rendered neither the results grid nor the per-record detail view (which is where the correspondent attorney/firm is exposed). What I do have is Google Patents' reassignment event log for US 5,033,252, which is populated from the same recorded documents but omits reel/frame for the 1992, 1995 and 2004 assignments. Two reel/frames are recoverable, because they are cited inside the 2007 release records themselves (see entries below). I have marked every field I could not verify as not retrieved rather than filling it in. Where I infer a mapping, I say so explicitly.

Inventors

Douglas V. Carter — sole named inventor (per the Google Patents bibliographic record and the printed front page as transcribed by uspto.report).

• Employer at filing: Entravision, Inc. — the application is a continuation of Ser. No. 07/273,605 (filed 1988-11-21, issued as US 4,947,620), itself a continuation of Ser. No. 07/137,436 (filed 1987-12-23, issued as US 4,805,377). All three share the title and the 1987-12-23 priority date, and Entravision, Inc. is the original assignee. That is the standard employer-owned-employee-invention posture; a single inventor of record with the company as assignee.
• Pattern note (negative finding): There is no evidence of the "all inventors depart within 12 months of filing" precursor to a portfolio fire-sale. The opposite is indicated: the inventor/applicant chain kept prosecuting the same disclosure across three separate filings spanning 1987 → 1988 → 1990, which is sustained corporate investment in the family, not abandonment. I have no employment or departure records for Mr. Carter beyond the patent face, so I cannot state his tenure dates — that is unclear.
• Citation-table artifact (building on the prior section, not repeating it): some third-party reference tables render this patent as "Carter et al." despite a single inventor. The front-page record is authoritative.

Original assignee

Entravision, Inc. — not Entravision Communications Corporation.

• Primary line of business: ophthalmic surgery products. Founded 1983; per the Los Angeles Times (1992-03-03), it "makes and distributes equipment, disposable accessories and solutions used in eye surgery," operating a manufacturing facility in Lenoir, North Carolina.
• Did it ship a product embodying the claims? Effectively yes — the commercial target of the claimed method is a terminally steam-sterilized balanced-salt irrigating solution in a polypropylene squeeze bottle. The L.A. Times piece identifies the relevant product line by name: an irrigating solution "Entravision calls Amo Endosol Extra," i.e., the AMO/Endosol ophthalmic irrigation product family. I have not verified the packaging format of that specific SKU against claim 1 (polypropylene bottle + silicone-gasketed cap + zone-coated Tyvek blister, blister-side-up autoclave trays), so the claim-by-claim embodiment link is moderate confidence, not verified.
• Current status: acquired — assets purchased by Allergan, Inc. The acquisition was announced 1992-03-02 (Allergan's March 1992 asset purchase), which the L.A. Times follow-up of 1992-10-29 confirms ("In March, the Irvine-based company acquired Entravision Inc., a Lenoir, N.C., maker of ophthalmic surgical products"). Entravision, Inc. as a legal entity is not a current operating concern on the record I retrieved; no bankruptcy proceeding for this Entravision is evidenced.
• Name-collision warning: Entravision Communications Corporation (NYSE: EVC), the Spanish-language media/broadcast and ad-tech company, is a completely unrelated entity that happens to share the name. Do not fold EVC's corporate history (including its 2000 IPO and later restructuring activity) into this chain. This is the single most likely source of error in any automated ownership trace of this patent.

Assignment timeline

Chronological, from the Google Patents reassignment log (which mirrors the recorded USPTO assignment documents). Reel/frame not retrieved except where the number is quoted inside a release record.

• 1992-04-10 (execution date not retrieved; this is the recorded/reassignment date) — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest (asset acquisition)
  • Assignor: Entravision, Inc.
  • Assignee: Allergan Medical Optics
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Acquisition — Allergan buys Entravision's ophthalmic-surgery assets (announced 1992-03-02), bringing the sterile saline package, the Endosol irrigation line and the manufacturing plant in-house.

• 1995-08-11 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest (recorded as "see document for details")
  • Assignor: Entravision, Inc. (as listed in the record)
  • Assignee: Allergan, Inc. (Allergan Medical Optics)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Internal reorganization / change of name of the receiving entity — most plausibly a confirmatory or corrective assignment perfecting the 1992 asset purchase into the Allergan, Inc. corporate name. Flagging the anomaly: it is unusual for a 1995 record to again name the already-divested 1992 seller as assignor. This may be a corrective record, or a Google-side parsing artifact in which the assignor block was inherited from the prior reel. I cannot resolve which without the document image.

• 2002-09-06 — Reel 13203/0039 (number cited in the 2007 release of the security interest at reel/frame 13203/0039; date-order mapping to this 2002 filing is my inference, since reel numbers increase monotonically)

  • Conveyance: Security Agreement
  • Assignor: Advanced Medical Optics, Inc.; AMO Holdings, LLC
  • Assignee: Bank of America, N.A.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Securitization / secured financing — this is a collateral grant covering the AMO group's IP, not a transfer of ownership. AMO was spun off from Allergan effective 2002-06-29 (began trading as AVO 2002-07-01); the security agreement follows the spinoff.

• 2004-06-22 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
  • Assignor: Allergan, Inc.
  • Assignee: Advanced Medical Optics, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Internal reorganization (spinoff completion / confirmatory transfer). The economic separation occurred 2002-06-29, but this assignment was recorded in 2004 — consistent with a confirmatory/nunc pro tunc assignment executed or recorded well after the spinoff effective date. Treat the 2004 date as the recorded date; the underlying execution date is not in the data I retrieved.

• 2004-07-29 — Reel 14913/0001 (number cited in the 2007 release of the security interest at reel/frame 14913/0001; date-order mapping to this 2004 filing is my inference)

  • Conveyance: Security Agreement
  • Assignor: Advanced Medical Optics, Inc.
  • Assignee: Bank of America, N.A., as Administrative Agent
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Securitization / refinancing — replacement or supplemental collateral grant banking the post-spinoff, post-Pfizer-surgical-acquisition AMO.

• 2007-04-04 — Reel/frame of the release itself not retrieved (the record cites the secured reel)

  • Conveyance: Release of Security Interest at Reel/Frame 14913/0001
  • Assignor: Bank of America, N.A.
  • Assignee: Advanced Medical Optics, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Lien release — the 2004 secured interest is discharged.

• 2007-04-04 — Reel/frame of the release itself not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Release of Security Interest at Reel/Frame 13203/0039
  • Assignor: Bank of America, N.A.
  • Assignee: Advanced Medical Optics, Inc.; AMO Holdings, Inc. (formerly AMO Holdings, LLC)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Lien release — the 2002 secured interest is discharged. (Note the "formerly AMO Holdings, LLC" recital: an internal name conversion within the group, not a patent assignment.)

• 2008-07-23 — Anticipated expiration (legal-status event, not an assignment). Term is 17 years from the 1991-07-23 issue date, consistent with a pre-URAA application.

Not found in the recorded chain (a finding, not an omission): the Google Patents event log contains no assignment to Abbott Medical Optics, to Johnson & Johnson Surgical Vision, or to any NPE. There is also no recorded assignment from Carter to Entravision visible in the event set. The current assignee field on Google Patents names Johnson and Johnson Surgical Vision Inc; that attribution is consistent with the corporate lineage (Allergan ophthalmic surgical → AMO spinoff 2002 → Abbott acquires AMO 2009 → J&J acquires Abbott Medical Optics 2017 → J&J Surgical Vision), but in a stock/asset purchase of an entire enterprise, title often moves by operation of the deal documents plus blanket IP assignments recorded at the parent-entity level, and this patent's per-patent record shows no such entry. I therefore restate the earlier section's caution: the AMO → Abbott → J&J leg is moderate confidence, sourced from corporate history rather than a per-patent recorded assignment.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 5033252
    1987 : Priority application filed
         : Entravision named original assignee
    1988 : First continuation filed
    1990 : Second continuation filed
    1991 : Patent issued to Entravision Inc
    1992 : Allergan buys Entravision assets
    1995 : Confirmatory assignment to Allergan Inc
    2002 : AMO spun off from Allergan
         : Security agreement to Bank of America
    2004 : Assignment to Advanced Medical Optics
         : Second security agreement to Bank of America
    2007 : Both security interests released
    2008 : Patent expires

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. No assignee carries an IP/Patents/Licensing/Ventures suffix. AMO Holdings, LLC does appear twice, but only as a co-grantor of collateral in the 2002-09-06 security agreement (reel 13203/0039), never as an assignee of the patent. A financing vehicle inside an operating group is not a licensing shell, and I found no product-free licensing entity anywhere in the chain.
2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. No assignment to or from Acacia, Marathon, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, or any Spider/Spangenberg entity. Every recorded assignee is an operating ophthalmic-surgical or lending institution: Entravision, Inc., Allergan Medical Optics, Allergan, Inc., Advanced Medical Optics, Inc., Bank of America, N.A.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear / unavailable. I could not retrieve any correspondent-of-record field; the Assignment Center detail view did not render. Because the data is absent, this is not a negative finding. I expressly decline to infer anything from the absence of correspondent names. It is worth noting as a hypothesis to test with direct Assignment Center access, because the pre-2004 links (1992 and 1995, both involving an Entravision assignor block) would be the natural place for a recurring recording attorney to show up — but that is a research lead, not evidence.
4. Cascading transfers — not present. The chain spans 1992 → 1995 → 2002 → 2004 → 2007, with no two consecutive ownership transfers inside the same 24-month window. The only same-day pair (the two 2007-04-04 releases) is a double lien discharge, not a cascade of LLC-to-LLC assignments.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. Consistent with the prior section's search, I found no infringement action naming US 5,033,252. There is therefore no suit for a transfer to precede. Additionally, the patent expired 2008-07-23, making any present or future assertion legally impossible.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. No Chapter 7/11 sale of this patent is evidenced. Entravision, Inc. exited via a negotiated asset purchase by Allergan in March 1992, not via insolvency proceedings. Allergan's 1992 restructuring (a $59.5M loss) is a cost-reduction event, not a bankruptcy. Do not import the unrelated Entravision Communications Corporation's corporate/restructuring history here (name collision, see above).
7. Privateering — not present. No transfer to an NPE that then asserted on the operating company's behalf. Allergan/AMO did have an active ophthalmic patent-enforcement posture in the 2000s, but nothing in this chain routes this patent to an outsourced enforcer, and no suit names it.
8. Defensive aggregator — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates inside a large operating ophthalmic-device company.

Corroborating context for signal 1 (negative): the 1992 transfer is independently documented as a strategic product-line acquisition, not a patent-monetization event. The L.A. Times reported the express rationale as expanding Allergan's surgical profit margin and securing the Endosol irrigating solution plus a cataract-surgery manufacturing facility — equipment, product and plant, with the IP riding along. That is the profile of an operating acquisition.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion — with an explicit qualification.

Justification: every recorded assignee in the chain is an operating ophthalmic-surgical company or its lender — Entravision, Inc. (1992-04-10 assignment), Allergan, Inc. (1995-08-11), Advanced Medical Optics, Inc. (2004-06-22) — with Bank of America, N.A. appearing only as secured party in the 2002-09-06 and 2004-07-29 security agreements (reels 13203/0039 and 14913/0001) and releasing both interests on 2007-04-04. There is not a single NPE signal above, and the patent expired 2008-07-23, so it cannot be asserted today. Strictly, though, the "assertion" prong of this verdict is not met: no suit naming US 5,033,252 was found (consistent with the prior section), so the accurate description is a non-asserted asset that remained inside operating companies for its entire enforceable life — none of the six labels fits this cleanly, and I am choosing the least-wrong one rather than overstating it.

Verify directly at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search by patent number 5033252) and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html. Priority retrieval items when you have Assignment Center access: (i) the reel/frame and correspondent for the 1992-04-10 and 1995-08-11 Entravision→Allergan records, to resolve the 1995 assignor anomaly in signal 3; and (ii) confirmation of whether any per-patent assignment exists for the Abbott → J&J Surgical Vision leg, which is currently the only unverified link in the chain.

I'll search for the patent and its cited prior art.

I need the "References Cited" section. Let me dig deeper.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 5,033,252 A ("Method of packaging and sterilizing a pharmaceutical product")

Bottom line up front: I was not able to retrieve the front-page "References Cited" (U.S. Patent Documents / Foreign Documents / Other Publications) list for US 5,033,252 from any source I could reach. Google Patents' rendering of the patent, as captured, contains a "Cited By (537)" table but no "Patent Citations" (backward-citation) table, and uspto.report, insight.rpxcorp, and PubChem all returned the specification/claims text without the examiner's citation list. Every numbered reference I could observe in connection with the '252 record is a forward citation (a later patent citing '252), which by definition cannot be §102 prior art against a patent whose priority date is 1987-12-23.

Rather than fabricate a citation list, I am separating what I can substantiate from what I cannot. Do not treat the numbered references below as "the examiner's cited art" — they are not.

1. Sources consulted

2. §102-eligible references I can identify

Because the '252 application was filed 1990-07-30 and is a continuation of Ser. No. 07/273,605 (filed 1988-11-21, issued as US 4,947,620) which is a continuation of Ser. No. 07/137,436 (filed 1987-12-23, issued as US 4,805,377), pre-AIA §102 applies. Two critical dates govern:

• §102(a)/(e) / invention-date critical date: on or before 1987-12-23 (earliest §120 benefit date), assuming benefit is perfected.
• §102(b) one-year bar: on or before 1986-12-23 (one year before the 1987-12-23 parent filing) for the strictest reading.

2.1 Applicant-admitted prior art (un-numbered) — admitted in the specification

2.2 Same-family documents (potential §102(e) references — but legally unavailable)

2.3 Foreign family counterpart (potential §102(a)/(b)-type publication art)

3. Forward citations — explicitly not prior art to '252

Every numbered document below is later than '252 and cites it. They cannot be §102 art against '252. I list the technically relevant ones because they define the post-'252 state of the art and are useful for construing claim terms (e.g., "blister-side-up," "wire mesh").

Justia citation tables in later patents render the '252 entry variously as 5033252 | July 23, 1991 | Carter and Carter et al. — e.g. in US 10,137,121 and US 10,815,235, and US 8,865,232. This is consistent with the discrepancy already flagged in the prior section: Google Patents lists a single inventor, Douglas V. Carter; Justia tables sometimes add "et al." I still have not seen the printed face of the patent to resolve it, and I would not treat "et al." as verified.

4. What any anticipating reference would have to disclose, claim by claim

Because the user asked which claims a reference would potentially anticipate, here is the element map. No reference I can currently identify discloses all of these, so my anticipation conclusion for claim 1 is negative for every candidate.

Practical consequence: claim 1 is drafted functionally as to the bottle material and the cap seal, so the anticipation question in any §102 challenge turns almost entirely on whether a single reference discloses (i) a vapor-impermeable, high-temperature-stable resilient bottle filled to capacity and (ii) the expansion-absorbing cap seal, in combination with the admittedly old blister/lid/sterilize steps. Any reference that supplies only the packaging half (as the admitted art does) cannot anticipate.

5. How to obtain the actual "References Cited" list (recommended next step)

I am explicitly declining to guess at the examiner-cited patent numbers. To get them authoritatively:

1. USPTO Patent Center / Public PAIR — file wrapper for application 07/559,340. https://patentcenter.uspto.gov (search application number 07/559,340 → "Documents & Transactions"). The 1990–91 prosecution papers include the examiner's PTO-892 "Notice of References Cited", which is the definitive list.
2. Printed front page of the patent PDF. The "References Cited" block (U.S. Patent Documents, Foreign Patent Documents, Other Publications) appears on the face of US 5,033,252, page 1. Google Patents links the PDF from https://patents.google.com/patent/US5033252/en ("Download PDF") but the automated fetch of the HTML rendering did not capture that block.
3. Google Patents "Patent Citations" accordion on the same page — expand it; it is present for most U.S. patents even when the text scrape omits it.
4. EPO Register / European search report for EP 0 322 134 A1 (filed 1988-12-05, published 1989-06-28). https://register.epo.org — the EPO search report for the same disclosure typically cites the same or overlapping art and is often easier to retrieve than a 1990 U.S. file wrapper.
5. The '377 and '620 file wrappers (Ser. Nos. 07/137,436 and 07/273,605) — earlier prosecutions of the identical disclosure; their PTO-892s frequently surface the art later re-cited against the continuation.

6. Flags on the previously generated sections

• No contradiction on substance. The bibliographic table, the continuation chain, the single-independent-claim structure, the 2008-07-23 expiration, and the "no litigation found (unverified negative)" caveat in the earlier section all remain consistent with what I re-observed.
• Correction to emphasis, not fact: the earlier section's usefulness framing implied the "Cited By (537)" table supplied context on the patent's art. It does not supply prior art — all 537 are forward citations dated after 1987-12-23. Any §102 analysis built on that table would be unsound.
• Date discrepancy (minor): the task header states the current date as April 26, 2026, while the analysis environment reports 2026-09-29. Neither affects anything here, since the patent expired 2008-07-23 and is not subject to post-grant challenges.
• Unverified, stated as such: I could not retrieve (a) the examiner-cited reference list, (b) any PTO-892, (c) any statutory disclaimer, or (d) any terminal disclaimer for this family. I also did not verify the Abbott → Johnson & Johnson Surgical Vision transfer chain from a primary assignment record, as already noted in the prior section.

7. Confidence summary

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5033252/en ; https://uspto.report/patent/grant/5033252 ; https://insight.rpxcorp.com/patent/US5033252A ; https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/patent/EP-0322134-A1 ; https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0322134B1/en ; https://patents.google.com/patent/WO1995000180A1/en ; https://patents.justia.com/patent/8865232 ; https://patents.justia.com/patent/[10137121](/patent/10137121) ; https://scispace.com/authors/douglas-v-carter-1dadmh3wei

I'll start by pulling the actual "Prior Art" / cited-references data for this patent, since the full text I was given shows only the forward-citation ("Cited By") table.

The forward-citation table is on the page, but I still need the backward citations (references cited against the '252 patent itself). Let me try to surface those, including via its parent patents that share the same specification.

I still haven't surfaced the examiner-cited (backward) references for '252. Let me characterize two pre-1988 candidate references and probe once more for a backward-citation list.

Obviousness Analysis — US 5,033,252 A under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Analyst note on task framing. You asked me to work from the "Prior Art section of this page." I have to flag a threshold problem before the analysis, because it materially changes what can be said.

1. What the "Prior Art" section of this page actually contains — and what it cannot support

The fetched Google Patents record for US 5,033,252 contains no "References Cited" / examiner-citation table. The only citation block present is "Cited By (537)" — i.e., forward citations (later documents citing '252). I ran four additional targeted searches for a backward-citation list (uspto.report, EveryPatent, Google Patents, general web) and could not surface one. So I cannot name the references the examiner actually cited against this patent, and I will not invent them.

Consequences, stated plainly:

• The 537 "Cited By" entries are not §102/§103 prior art against '252. By definition they published after the '252 priority date (1987-12-23). Examples on the page: US 5,389,414 (1995), US 5,830,547 (1998), US 6,018,931 (2000), US 7,051,906 (2006), WO 1995/000180, WO 2000/073156. These are useful only as evidence of what the field was doing later — not as art.
• The same-family documents are also not §103 art. US 4,805,377 (issued 1989-02-21) and US 4,947,620 (issued 1990-08-14) are the parents in the continuation chain, and US 5,052,558 is a sibling. Assuming the §120 benefit to 1987-12-23 is perfected, their issue dates fall after the operative date; and because they are the same inventive entity, they are not "by another" for §102(e). Their proper doctrinal home is obviousness-type double patenting, not §103.
• Caveat with teeth: if the §120 chain to Ser. No. 07/137,436 is not perfected (e.g., a claim in '252 lacking support in the '436 disclosure), the operative date shifts to 1990-07-30. US 4,805,377 (issued 1989-02-21) then falls more than one year before that date and becomes §102(b) art in its own right — and it discloses essentially the entire process at issue. I could not verify the priority chain from the file wrapper; Google Patents labels its priority date an "assumption."

So the honest position is: the strongest "prior art on this page" is the specification's own admitted prior art, supplemented by field references I identified in the searches. Everything below is labelled accordingly.

2. The admitted prior art (highest confidence — quoted from the '252 Background)

The Background section is an admission of what was known:

"the common practice is to aseptically fill the polyethylene bottles with a sterile solution, pack and seal the filled bottles in the blister packages, and expose each package to sterilization by ethylene oxide gas."

"the solution in a polyethylene squeeze bottle which includes an adapter that receives an irrigation cannula" … "packed individually in a preformed blister pack which is sealed with a Tyvek™ lid."

This admission supplies, as of 1987: (i) a squeeze bottle with a cannula adapter; (ii) individual blister packaging; (iii) a Tyvek-type nonwoven lid; (iv) terminal sterilization of the complete package. Claim 1(d) is therefore largely admitted art, with the only delta being that the lid must survive steam rather than EtO.

3. Candidate §103 references identified (provenance flagged)

These appeared in a "documents considered" list attached to DE 60005817 T2 (a different patent's citation table), not verified against the '252 record:

Caveat: I have only titles, dates and (for some) a one-line description. I have not read the bodies of these documents, so the mappings below are title-level inferences and must be verified against full text before being relied on.

Two post-dating documents on the page are worth noting as field context only: WO 1995/000180 (Farco-Pharma) describes "the US-PS 5033252" as disclosing a sterilization process in which a bottle filled with sterile saline is placed in a blister — i.e., later practitioners treated '252 as the baseline in this space. WO 2000/073156 and US 7,051,906 (Novartis) later claim a polypropylene package that "shows after an autoclaving processing of at least 121 °C and for at least 20 minutes no deformation." These are not art, but they show the problem was a known, actively pursued field objective.

4. The §103 case against claim 1 (the only independent claim)

Claim 1 is drafted functionally — the bottle material is defined by results ("will withstand sterilizing temperatures without deforming," "substantially no leakage of vapor through the wall") rather than by composition. Polypropylene appears only in claim 3. KSR and cases like In re Schreiber and In re Swinehart make this the central vulnerability: the claim reads on any autoclavable, low-permeability polymer, so a §103 case need only show that selecting some such polymer was obvious — not that polypropylene specifically was.

Recommended combination A (primary rejection): admitted art + known autoclavable polymer + known overpressure steam cycle.

Motivation to combine is unusually strong and comes from the patent's own text plus the field:

1. A recognized problem with an identified cause and a finite set of fixes. The Background expressly states that LDPE "melts at approximately 100 °C [and] cannot be heat sterilized (heat sterilization requires a minimum of 121 °C)," and that EtO residue reacts in the saline to form ethylene glycol and ethylene chlorhydrin, "potentially dangerous irritants … highly undesirable in eye or other surgical irrigation solutions." Where a reference identifies a defect and the art supplies a known remedy, the combination is obvious (In re Kahn; KSR).
2. Substitution of a known equivalent process step. Terminal steam sterilization of a packed pharmaceutical is not a new technique; Del Laboratories' US 4,644,966 and Mallinckrodt's US 4,718,463 are on point. Tyvek-type lid stock is purpose-built to be permeable to steam and gas — permeability is the reason it was used with EtO. The lid in claim 1(d) is claimed by its permeability, not by any chemistry that differs between sterilants.
3. A known material with predictable behaviour. Moving from LDPE to polypropylene for autoclavability is a selection among a small, enumerated set of commodity polymers with published thermal limits. The patent itself concedes the result was not unpredictable: polypropylene "is known to soften to some extent at 121 °C."
4. KSR "obvious to try" / design incentive. A mature, crowded art — the patent's own USPC class is Package Making: Methods: Sterilizing complete package: For preformed receptacle with separate closure, a dedicated subclass. In a predictable art with a known problem and a limited number of identified solutions, the burden is on the applicant to show the combination was not obvious.

Reasonable expectation of success. Filling a container to exclude headspace and applying a pressure-compensated (overpressure) autoclave cycle are standard anti-deformation measures. The specification's "overpressure" feature — "compressed air … at approximately twenty-five psi to thirty psi while maintaining the steam temperature at approximately 121 °C … a fan is also used … to ensure total mixing of air and steam" — is described as a technique already "used for sterilization of other types of packages." That is an admission that the cycle itself is conventional.

5. Dependent claims 2–11

With the exception of claims 9 and 10, these are material selections and conventional packaging steps with no asserted unexpected result:

• 2 translucent bottle — clarity-grade PP for medical packaging was commercially routine; the specification simply says the grade was "selected for its clarity."
• 3 / 4 / 5 polypropylene bottle; cap of the same material / polypropylene cap — obvious selection; the specification concedes "there are other polymeric materials which might be suitable."
• 6 silicone rubber washer — the specification undercuts this itself: "other rubber or polymeric materials might be used to form the washer," and silicone is chosen because it "is an acceptable material in medical and pharmaceutical products because silicone is non-toxic." That is a statement of a known, desirable property, i.e., a result-effective variable resolved by ordinary skill.
• 7 polycarbonate blister — a conventional blister material; polycarbonate's heat-softening is acknowledged in the specification, yet the claim recites no structural adaptation.
• 8 printed polyester label applied before filling — preprinted self-adhesive polyester label stock is ubiquitous; no result beyond label adhesion.
• 9 label extends "no more than two-thirds" around the circumference — the weakest 103 target and the one most amenable to a rebuttal. This is a numerical limit justified by an asserted new result (avoiding wrinkling/creasing during steam sterilization). Expect the applicant to argue In re Antonie / criticality. But absent evidence of a sharp, unexpected threshold at exactly ⅔, this is optimized to a result-effective variable and would be argued as routine experimentation.
• 10 blister-side-up in a wire-mesh tray — only two physical orientations exist, and KSR "obvious to try" applies squarely. The rationale (keep the bottle's weight off a heat-softened blister; drain condensate; let cooling air diffuse downward through the uncoated lid) is mechanically self-evident, and perforated/mesh drain trays were ordinary autoclave furniture.
• 11 steam sterilization — the core substitution and the object of the whole exercise.

Notable drafting gap: the feature the specification most emphasizes as novel — the "zone-coating" of adhesive only where the nonwoven lid contacts the blister flange — is not claimed anywhere in claims 1–11. Claim 1(d) recites only "a closure lid made from a non-woven textile material having the characteristics of being permeable." A PHOSITA reading the specification would see the asserted inventive contribution concentrated in an unclaimed feature, which weakens the non-obviousness argument for the claimed subject matter.

6. Anticipated rebuttals and secondary considerations

Arguments the applicant would raise (and my assessment):

• Teaching away. The art teaches that polypropylene "softens to some extent at 121 °C" and that polycarbonate blisters deform and seals pop. Assessment: weak. In re Fulton/DePuy — "softens to some extent" is a caution, not an exhortation against the route; the patent itself shows the route worked with ordinary measures. Softening that is managed is not a teaching away.
• Criticality of fill-to-capacity / no headspace. Assessment: moderate but likely insufficient. The asserted benefit is a direct physical consequence of eliminating the trapped-air pressure term, and the specification frames it as an observed result, not a discovered mechanism.
• Commercial success, long-felt need, failure of others. The Background states that prior steam-sterilized attempts "have been commerically unsuccessful," and the assignment trail (Entravision → Allergan Medical Optics → Allergan → Advanced Medical Optics → J&J Surgical Vision) evidences a product line of real commercial weight. Assessment: this is the applicant's best rebuttal, but the nexus is fragile. (i) The claims are broad and functional, so the commercial product's success is not presumptively coextensive with the claim; (ii) the success is plausibly attributable to the unclaimed zone-coated lid and to process/labelling controls (the 24-hour pre-labelling), not to the claimed elements; (iii) the long-felt need — avoiding EtO residuals — is precisely the motivation the §103 case relies on, so the same evidence cuts both ways.

7. Bottom line

On the record available to me, claim 1 would face a strong prima facie §103 rejection, and claims 2–8 and 11 would likely fall with it as obvious selections and conventional steps. Claim 9 (two-thirds label) is the durable claim; claim 10 (blister-side-up / wire mesh tray) is close to the KSR "obvious to try" line given only two orientations exist and the benefit is mechanical.

The practical exposure of the whole family is the same: the specification teaches a problem-solution pattern that a PHOSITA would follow stepwise — substitute an autoclavable polymer for the LDPE one, use the steam cycle already used on other packages, keep the conventional blister/Tyvek format, and compensate for the new thermal stresses with well-understood expedients (headspace elimination, gasketing, overpressure, tray orientation, condensate drainage).

8. Confidence and limitations (please read before relying on this)

Single most important gap: the examiner's actual cited references for '252. If you can supply the "References Cited" face page or the file wrapper, the combination analysis in §4 should be rebuilt around those documents rather than the proxies used here. I have deliberately not asserted any specific reference as the examiner's art.