US 7247323

I'll search for authoritative information on this patent, including any litigation or docket activity.

Let me run additional targeted searches for any litigation or PTAB activity.

US Patent 7,247,323 — Analyst Summary

Identification & bibliographic data

Family / country status (7): WO2007022141A1, EP1926471A1 (withdrawn), JP2009504745A (withdrawn), KR20080032189A (ceased), AU2006279602B2 (ceased), CA2619393A1 (abandoned), and the US case (expired). All appear inactive.

Classification highlights: A61K8/92, A61K36/77 (Sapindaceae), A61K36/15 (Pinaceae), A61K36/27, A61K36/286, A61P3/04 (anorexiants/antiobesity), A61Q1/06 (lipsticks), A23L33/30 (dietetic methods for weight loss).

Abstract (paraphrase)

A topical delivery system for application to the lips comprising at least one naturally occurring oil, at least one naturally occurring wax, and at least one naturally occurring diet aid. Also disclosed is a method for controlling weight in an individual by applying such a composition to the lips.

Plain-language overview of the claims

Note: all three claims are composition claims. Despite the specification's discussion of "methods for delivering a diet aid" and "controlling weight," no method claim issued.

• Claim 1 (independent) — lipstick: A lipstick composition containing (a) at least one naturally occurring oil, (b) at least one naturally occurring wax, and (c) at least one naturally occurring diet aid component. The diet aid must include at least one of three named materials: pine nut (Korean) seed oil, caralluma fimbriata stem extract, and/or guarana seed extract.
• Claim 2 (independent) — lip gloss: Identical elements to Claim 1, but the product form is a lip gloss rather than a lipstick.
• Claim 3 (dependent on Claim 1): Narrows the diet aid of Claim 1 to a specific six-component combination: lecithin, pine nut (Korean) seed oil, caralluma fimbriata stem extract, extract of ribes nigrum (black currant), guarana seed extract, and isomerized safflower glycerides.

Both independent claims are broad in the sense that the "naturally occurring oil" and "wax" elements are functionally defined rather than limited to particular species; the distinguishing feature is the closed list of three diet-aid materials in the "at least one of" formulation.

Litigation / docket search — important negative finding

I searched for litigation, PTAB, and CAFC docket activity tied specifically to 7,247,323 and found no district-court complaint, IPR/PGR, or Federal Circuit appeal involving this patent. Search hits that looked superficially relevant involved different patents (e.g., the "‛323" hits returned were U.S. 7,921,323 in Lionra Technologies / Cisco, IPR2023-01047, which is unrelated). I could not locate any 2026 CAFC docket activity for this patent, and given that the patent lapsed in 2011 for non-payment of maintenance fees, active enforcement in 2026 is very unlikely. I flag this as a not-found/uncertainty rather than a confirmed absence, since I cannot query Docket Navigator or PACER directly.

Notable forward-citation context

The patent is cited as prior art (category: substance-emitting lipstick/toothpaste-type prior art) in later patents including US 9,067,070 and US 9,456,916 (Medibotics LLC), showing it has been treated as prior art in the appetite-suppressant/consumption-modification space.

Sources

• Google Patents full text: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7247323/en
• USPTO patent PDF: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/44/e5/45/1a58087985be1b/US7247323.pdf
• Justia (pre-grant pub US20070042058): https://patents.justia.com/patent/20070042058
• Espacenet family record: https://worldwide.espacenet.com/ (search returned the US2007042058/US7247323 family, priority 2005-08-17, applicant ELC MAN LLC)

The patent text supplied in the prompt is the authoritative record and matches these sources. If you need certified-status confirmation (e.g., a formal USPTO PatentCenter maintenance-fee/expiration transaction history) or a PACER/Docket Navigator litigation check, I would need to retrieve that directly — I did not have access to those proprietary databases in this session.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 7247323 across litigation-tracking sources.

The first result referenced a different patent (8,243,723 — a Uniloc VoIP patent), which I'll exclude per your instruction. Let me run more targeted searches.

None of those hits involve US 7,247,323. Let me run a few more targeted searches on litigation-specific databases.

Litigation search results for U.S. Patent No. 7,247,323

Bottom line: I found no known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 7,247,323.

Based on the searches I was able to run before hitting a tool limit, no district court case, Federal Circuit appeal, ITC investigation, or PTAB proceeding appears to have asserted or challenged U.S. 7,247,323 ("Delivery system for appetite suppressant," ELC Management LLC; filed 2006-08-15; granted 2007-07-24).

What I searched

• General web queries for "US patent 7247323 litigation," "7,247,323" combined with "infringement," "lawsuit," "complaint," and "ELC Management."
• Targeted queries aimed at the Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist), Docket Alarm, CourtListener, RPX Insight, and PTAB/PACER-style sources.

Why the negatives are consistent with the record

The evidence I did retrieve supports the conclusion of no litigation:

1. No litigation data on the patent's own page. The Google Patents page for US7247323B2 lists only forward/backward citations, family members, and legal events — there is no "Litigation" section, which normally appears when a patent has been asserted.
2. The patent's prosecution/term history shows it was never commercialized or enforced. The legal events show a maintenance-fee reminder (2011-02-28), lapse for nonpayment (2011-07-24), patent discontinuation (2011-08-22), and expiration due to failure to pay maintenance fees (2011-09-13). The patent lapsed roughly four years after grant.
3. The entire family went inactive. Corresponding WO, EP, JP, KR, CA, and AU members are all recorded as not_active (withdrawn, ceased, or abandoned).

Important note on misleading near-matches (per your strict rule)

My searches returned several results for numerically similar but different patents, which I am explicitly not attributing to US 7,247,323:

• 8,243,723 — a Uniloc VoIP/instant-voice-message patent litigated against Apple (Fed. Cir. No. 19-1151, Apple Inc. v. Uniloc 2017 LLC). Different number (8,243,723 ≠ 7,247,323).
• 7,921,323 — a Lionra Technologies networking patent (Lionra v. Fortinet/Cisco/etc., E.D. Tex. 2:22-cv-00305/00322/00334; Cisco IPR2023-01047).
• Various ANDA cases referencing a different "'323 patent" (e.g., Boehringer Ingelheim v. Ipca, D. Del. 1:25-cv-01207).
• A firearms-related "'723 patent" in ABC IP, LLC v. 80Mills LLC (N.D. Ohio 1:25-cv-01262).

None of these involve U.S. 7,247,323.

Confidence and caveats

• Confidence: moderate-to-high that no litigation exists, given the expired/abandoned status across the whole family and the absence of any litigation record for this specific number in the sources indexed.
• Caveat: I was unable to complete direct, exhaustive queries of PACER, the Unified Patents litigation case list, or CourtListener's docket API because the tool session ended early. If you want a definitive negative, I recommend confirming via a direct Unified Patents caselist query filtered on patent number 7247323 and a CourtListener/RPX docket search. I did not find any case in the searches I completed, and I would not characterize that as proof of zero litigation — only as "no litigation located."

If you'd like, I can re-run targeted checks against specific docket sources (Unified Patents caselist, CourtListener, RPX Insight) when the search tool is available again.

I'll start by verifying the structured "no proceedings" signal against public sources.

Let me check for any litigation-driven or reexam activity that might not be in the ODP trial feed.

PTAB Proceedings Dossier — US 7,247,323 B2

"Delivery system for appetite suppressant" · ELC Management LLC (original assignee) · App. 11/464,655 · Priority 2005-08-17 · Issued 2007-07-24

Sourcing note. The canonical list supplied in the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal) contains zero AIA trial proceedings for this patent. I ran independent web searches against Google Patents' litigation/proceedings tab, PTAB docket aggregators, and general web indices for both the patent number and the parties; nothing surfaced an IPR, PGR, or CBM, and nothing surfaced a Federal Circuit appeal. I therefore report a null result rather than reconstructing proceedings. Two searches hit a step limit and did not return — see "Residual verification gaps" below.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 7,247,323: 0 — no active proceedings, no claims invalidated by the PTAB, none sustained, none settled, none institution-denied. The structured ODP list is empty and no public source contradicts it.

The bottom line for a defendant is not a PTAB story at all — it's an expiration story. The patent lapsed on 2011-07-24 for failure to pay the 4-year maintenance fee (USPTO legal events: maintenance-fee reminder 2011-02-28 → "Lapse for failure to pay maintenance fees" 2011-07-24 → "PATENT EXPIRED DUE TO NONPAYMENT OF MAINTENANCE FEES UNDER 37 CFR 1.362" 2011-08-22). It issued with only three claims, none of which was ever tested at the Board. So the correct framing is not "the patent survived two IPRs and is hardened" — it is "the patent is dead by its own hand, the whole family is abandoned, and there is no PTAB record to litigate because nobody ever needed one."

Per-proceeding entries

(None exist. The section below substitutes for the standard per-proceeding format and documents the null result plus the meaningful non-PTAB validity events.)

NO AIA PROCEEDING ON FILE — null result

• Type: n/a
• Filed: n/a
• Status: No IPR / PGR / CBM on record. The ODP structured block returns an empty proceeding set.
• Judge panel: n/a
• Petition grounds: n/a
• Institution decision: n/a
• Final Written Decision: n/a
• Settlement / termination: n/a
• Appeal: No CAFC appeal of a PTAB decision exists to find. There is no opinion to link on CourtListener.
• Defensive value: You cannot build a § 315(e)(2) estoppel defense, because there is no petitioner and therefore no estoppel. But you also don't need one — the enforceability problem (§ self-inflicted expiration, below) is stronger than any invalidity theory a petitioner could have run.

Null-result evidence and caveats

Why the absence is entirely plausible (and not a data hole). The patent was enforceable for roughly four years (2007-07-24 → 2011-07-24) and is a consumer-cosmetics formulation patent held by a cosmetics house (ELC Management LLC — The Estée Lauder Companies), not a litigating entity. There is no suggestion in any source I found of an assertion campaign against which an IPR would have been filed. Well-asserted patents attract IPRs; this one was never asserted in the record I can see, so the absence of IPRs is a signal about non-use, not about a hardened patent.

Residual verification gaps (stated explicitly, per the no-fabrication constraint):

1. I could not complete the final two confirmation searches (patent-number litigation sweep; ELC enforcement/licensing sweep) — they hit the tool step limit. A Docket Navigator or RPX litigation check should be run to confirm the patent was never asserted. The RPX Insight landing page for US7247323B2 that did return showed only bibliographic and claim data, no litigation records, but that page is not a complete litigation registry.
2. Ex parte reexamination: I found no reexamination certificate or reexam event for '323, but I did not exhaustively query the Central Reexamination Unit. Treat "no reexam" as likely-but-unconfirmed.
3. District-court litigation history is not affirmatively established as zero — only "nothing surfaced."

Strategic summary

1. Claim status — all three claims are UNTESTED, but all three are MOOT.
No claim of '323 has been canceled or sustained by the PTAB; the patent issued with claims 1, 2 and 3 only:

• Claim 1 (independent) — a lipstick composition: naturally occurring oil + naturally occurring wax + a naturally occurring diet aid comprising at least one of pine nut (Korean) seed oil, caralluma fimbriata stem extract, and guarana seed extract.
• Claim 2 (independent) — the same, but a lip gloss composition.
• Claim 3 (dependent on claim 1) — requires the diet aid to be a six-ingredient combination: lecithin, pine nut (Korean) seed oil, caralluma fimbriata stem extract, an extract of ribes nigrum, guarana seed extract and isomerized safflower glycerides.

Two consequences a defendant should internalize. First, there are no method claims. The published application (US 2007/0042058 A1) contained broad genus claims (its claim 1, "topical composition suitable for application to the lips comprising…"), 50%-naturally-occurring claims, and method claims for controlling weight and for delivering a diet aid (published claims 3–4). None of that issued. The patent that actually exists is a two-independent-composition-claim patent for lipstick and lip gloss only — a third party cannot infringe it by making a lip balm, a lotion, a capsule, or by "delivering a diet aid" as a method. Second, if the patent were alive, claims 1–2's "at least one of A, B, and C" phrasing is a textbook § 112(b) indefiniteness/claim-congruence target (is it conjunctive or alternative?), and the issued scope was narrowed dramatically against the art of record — including US 2003/0095936 A1 (Light, "Lip gloss composition") and US 2004/0247702 A1 (Rajendran, "Caralluma extract products"), both cited on the face of the patent.

2. Estoppel landscape — § 315(e)(2) is inapplicable, not merely favorable.
Statutory estoppel attaches to a petitioner (and its privies/real parties in interest) after a final written decision. There is no petitioner, no institution, no FWD — so there is no § 315(e)(2) bar on anyone. Every prior-art ground is theoretically still available to any challenger. That is a distinction without practical consequence here, because the more basic obstacle is that the patent expired on 2011-07-24 for nonpayment of maintenance fees, and:

• Damages cannot accrue for any post-2011-07-24 conduct;
• A § 286 six-year recovery lookback means actionable (pre-expiration) conduct had to be sued on by roughly 2017-07-24, which is long past;
• Lapse for fee nonpayment is self-inflicted; revival requires a petition under 37 CFR 1.378. No petition to revive appears in the legal-events record, and the USPTO status still reads "Expired - Fee Related" as of the most recent data. Something approaching fifteen years post-lapse, revival is a practical impossibility — but a defendant served by a successor assignee should demand the maintenance-fee record and any revival petition directly from Patent Center rather than relying on a third-party status field.

3. Pattern signals.
No repeat petitioner (there are none). No aggressive PTAB appeal practice by the patent owner (nothing to appeal). No defensive aggregator such as Unified Patents in the chain — no third-party challenge of any kind exists, which is consistent with a patent that was never worth challenging. The strongest corroborating signal is family-wide abandonment: WO 2007/022141 A1 ceased, EP 1926471 A1 withdrawn, JP 2009504745 A withdrawn, KR 20080032189 A ceased, AU 2006279602 B2 ceased, CA 2619393 A1 abandoned, and the US member lapsed for fees. The assignee walked away from the entire portfolio in every jurisdiction.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant and the patent owner (or a successor/assignee) is asserting '323 today:

1. Lead with expiration, and put it in writing immediately. The dispositive facts are in the patent's own USPTO record: lapsed 2011-07-24, statutory discontinuation 2011-08-22, "Expired - Fee Related." There is no FWD to quote because no IPR/PGR/CBM was ever filed — say that plainly, because it forecloses the opposing side's ability to argue "the claims were tested and survived." Cross-reference the patent page: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7247323/en.
2. Demand the chain of title and the maintenance-fee record from USPTO PatentCenter (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov). Confirm no § 1.378 petition to revive was granted and no reissue/reexam certificate issued. Note the assignment recorded 2008-02-28 to ELC Management LLC (Reel/Frame 020576/0743) as the last title event in the record — verify whether any later transfer to a litigating entity exists, because a demand letter citing claims 1–2 of an expired patent is a strong candidate for a § 285 fee motion.
3. If the patent were somehow revived, three defense tracks are already visible on the face of the record: (a) § 112(b) on the "at least one of A, B, and C" congruence problem in claims 1–2; (b) § 103 over the art of record — US 6,376,657 (CSIR, appetite-suppressant compositions / Hoodia), US 2004/0247702 A1 (caralluma extracts), US 2003/0095936 A1 (lip gloss composition), WO 2001/003714 A1 (Prunus endocarp as dietary supplement) — and (c) § 103 over the public PinnoThin™/Korean pine nut corpus (Lipid Nutrition; the Pasman and Halford satiety studies), which post-dates the 2005 priority date only in part and is highly material to claim 1's "pine nut (Korean) seed oil" element. Note that Example 2 of the patent itself sources "Pinnothin" from Lipid Nutrition North America — the same commercial needle the patent covers.
4. No milestone calendar to track. Because there is no live AIA proceeding, there is no institution-decision deadline, no oral hearing, and no statutory 1-year FWD due date. Do not let an adversary imply otherwise.
5. Preserve the null result. If you need a paper trail, pull the PTAB E2E proceeding search (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb/) and the Federal Circuit docket/CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/) results showing zero hits for this patent, and date-stamp them. There is no opinion to hyperlink precisely because no proceeding exists.

Prepared 2026-09-30. All dates in YYYY-MM-DD. Proceeding count and statuses taken verbatim from the supplied ODP structured block; claim text and legal events taken from the authoritative patent text at the URL above. Where verification was incomplete, that is flagged above rather than assumed.

I'll research the assignment record for this patent, starting with the USPTO Assignment Center and cross-referencing public databases.

Let me dig into the specific assignment records and correspondent details.

Let me search for the specific assignment record details and inventor employment context.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 7,247,323 B2

Data-retrieval caveat (read first): The authoritative assignment data below comes from the patent's own legal-events record (Google Patents), which reproduces the USPTO assignment transaction. I attempted to open the USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov) detail page for Reel 020576/0743 to capture the correspondent of record, but my search session hit its step limit before that page resolved. I therefore report the reel/frame, parties, and dates from the verified record, and I flag the correspondent field as NOT RETRIEVED rather than guessing it. Everything else below is grounded in the cited record.

Inventors

Unusual patterns: The record does not show any inventor departing the assignee, and no inventor-to-third-party assignments appear. All four inventors appear only once, jointly, in a single assignment to the original corporate assignee (Reel 020576/0743). There is no fire-sale precursor pattern (no staggered inventor assignments, no post-filing re-assignment). Note the name variance between the patent cover ("Craig Tadlock") and the assignment record ("Charles Craig Tadlock") — same person; not a discrepancy in the chain.

Original assignee

• ELC Management LLC (New York), a wholly owned intellectual-property holding entity within The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. (NYSE: EL).
• Named as both Original Assignee and Current Assignee on the patent — i.e., the patent never left the Estée Lauder organization.
• Primary line of business: Cosmetics/skin care/lip products. ELC Management LLC functions as the Estée Lauder group's IP-holding vehicle (it recurs as assignee on Estée Lauder/Clinique/Aveda filings), which is a corporate-IP-subsidiary structure, not an NPE structure — it sits inside an operating company that ships cosmetic products.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Unclear. The specification discloses lipstick/lip-gloss formulations with pine nut (Korean) seed oil, caralluma fimbriata extract, and guarana seed extract (claims 1–3). I found no evidence of a commercial lip product launched under these claims, but absence of evidence here is not proof of absence.
• Current status: Estée Lauder remains an operating, publicly traded company. The patent itself is dead: maintenance-fee reminder 2011-02-28, lapse for non-payment effective 2011-07-24, discontinuation notice 2011-08-22.

Assignment timeline

The record shows exactly one recorded assignment. There is no post-issuance chain.

• 2008-02-26 (executed/effective) / recorded 2008-02-28 — Reel 020576/0743
  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest (origin/job-related assignment)
  • Assignor: Liliana George; Charles Craig Tadlock; Raffi J. Balian; Monica Apostol (all four named inventors)
  • Assignee: ELC Management LLC, New York
  • Correspondent: Not retrieved — the USPTO Assignment Center record was inaccessible this session. (For context only, and not a finding for this reel/frame: Estée Lauder's Trademark-side filings of record name in-house correspondent Donna M. Ruggiero / uspto@estee.com, 767 Fifth Avenue, New York — treated here as an unconfirmed lead, not evidence.)
  • Context: Initial inventor → corporate assignment. Recorded ~18 months after the 2006-08-15 filing and after the 2007-07-24 issue date, consistent with a confirmatory/late-recorded employment assignment rather than any subsequent transfer.

Because the Assignment Center returned no post-original records and I could not complete the live lookup, I state plainly: there is no recorded assignment beyond the original inventor-to-ELC Management LLC instrument. Post-issuance, the patent stayed put and simply lapsed.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 7247323
    2005 : Provisional application filed
    2006 : Non-provisional application filed
    2007 : Patent issued to ELC Management LLC
    2008 : Inventors assign to ELC Management LLC
         : Assignment recorded Reel 020576 Frame 0743
    2011 : Patent lapses for unpaid maintenance fee

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data — strictly, only the original assignment exists. The full chain is a single instrument: the four inventors → ELC Management LLC, executed 2008-02-26 and recorded 2008-02-28 at Reel 020576/0743. There is no post-issuance transfer of any kind, no shell LLC, no known asserter, and no litigation; the patent simply expired for non-payment effective 2011-07-24. On the available record this is a mainstream operating-company patent that was never monetized or asserted, and no NPE signal is supported — the "Insufficient data" label applies because the record contains nothing beyond the original assignment, not because of ambiguity about an NPE chain.

Verification link: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search "7247323") — and https://patents.google.com/patent/US7247323/en (legal-events block showing the single 2008-02-28 assignment, Reel 020576/0743). The one outstanding verification item is the correspondent of record on Reel 020576/0743, which I could not surface this session and which I decline to fill in by inference.

I'll ground this analysis in current search results. Let me run several targeted lookups.

Good grounding on the key references. Let me verify the remaining cited references.

Prior‑Art Analysis — US 7,247,323 B2

1. Scope, data source, and two flags

Target confirmed (literal). The search target is US 7,247,323 B2 — Delivery system for appetite suppressant — application 11/464,655, filed 2006‑08‑15, claiming benefit of provisional 60/708,995 (filed 2005‑08‑17), granted 2007‑07‑24, assignee ELC Management LLC. I deliberately excluded near‑number hits (e.g., 7,921,323, which is the unrelated Lionra/Cisco patent already noted in the earlier section) and matched only the ′323 record requested.

Flag 1 — data source limitation. I retrieved the citation record from the Google Patents record for US7247323, which reproduces the USPTO "References Cited" front‑page data. I could not query USPTO PatentCenter / the Image File Wrapper (IFW) or Examined‑Art Unit records in this session. Consequently I can report what was cited and by whom, but I cannot certify which specific references the examiner actually invoked in a §102 rejection versus a §103 rejection, or what was overcome by amendment. That distinction lives in the IFW, which should be pulled for a definitive answer.

Flag 2 — date inconsistency. My operating date is 2026‑09‑30; this task prompt states April 26, 2026. I am using the operating date. This does not affect the prior‑art analysis (all art predates 2005), but it is a contradiction worth noting per the cross‑referencing instruction.

Flag 3 — IPR/assignee context. As established in the prior section, the patent lapsed for non‑payment of maintenance fees effective 2011‑07‑24, so no live §102 dispute exists; this is a retrospective/validity‑style analysis of the cited art.

2. The legal frame for this claim set

From the authoritative claim text, all three claims are composition claims:

• Claim 1 (lipstick) = naturally occurring oil + naturally occurring wax + a diet aid "comprising at least one of pine nut (Korean) seed oil, caralluma fimbriata stem extract, guarana seed extract."
• Claim 2 (lip gloss) = same elements, product form = lip gloss.
• Claim 3 (dep. on 1) = diet aid narrowed to the six‑component combination: lecithin + pine nut (Korean) seed oil + caralluma fimbriata stem extract + extract of ribes nigrum + guarana seed extract + isomerized safflower glycerides.

So a §102 anticipation requires one single reference disclosing (a) a lipstick or lip gloss product form, (b) a naturally occurring oil, (c) a naturally occurring wax, and (d) at least one of the three closed‑list diet aids. That combination is the analytical test I apply below.

3. The twelve USPTO "Patent Citations" — reference‑by‑reference

Google Patents marks some cited references with "*" (cited by examiner) versus unmarked/applicant‑supplied. I note that provenance because examiner‑cited references are the ones most likely to have driven a §102/§103 rejection.

3.1 References cited by the examiner (*)

3.2 Applicant/other‑cited references (unmarked)

4. "Family Cites Families" (4) — cited in the WO/EP/foreign siblings

5. Non‑patent citations (11) — the substantive diet‑aid support

These are the references that supply the known appetite‑suppressant/fat‑reduction activity of the three claimed materials:

• Guarana: "GUARANA: Physical Stimulating and Lipolysis Activating," International Sourcing Inc. / Greentech S.A. product info sheet (May 1998, resubmitted 2006‑11‑13) → supports guarana seed extract (Claims 1–3).
• Guarana: health‑marketplace.com (retrieved 2005‑03‑10); Amazing Nature "Guarana (Paullinia cupana)" (2002‑11‑04); Boozer CN et al., Int. J. Obes. Relat. Metab. Disord. 25(3):316–324 (Mar. 2001), Ma Huang–guarana weight‑loss RCT (abstract).
• Pine nut: "Lipid Nutrition Introduces a New Ingredient" (retrieved 2006‑08‑04) → Korean pine nut / PinnoThin technology, i.e., supports pine nut (Korean) seed oil (Claims 1–3). This reference maps directly to the "Pinnothin" material used in Example 2.
• Caralluma: Phytobase Nutritionals Inc., "Caralluma fimbriata" (2004–2006, retrieved 2006‑08‑04) → supports caralluma fimbriata stem extract (Claims 1–3).
• Hoodia: Phytopharm plc, "Hoodia Gordonii Fact File" (retrieved 2006‑10‑18); Maxam Nutraceutics "ANAVONE"; Yerba Mate (2005); FDA Consumer, "Losing Weight Safely"; Derwent‑ACC 2001‑112573 (Green et al., PCT, Jan. 2001).

Critically, the guarana, pine‑nut, and caralluma references are isolated ingredient literature — they establish that each material is a known, naturally occurring appetite suppressant/fat‑reduction agent, but none places any of them in a lipstick or lip gloss with an oil and a wax.

6. §102 element mapping — the bottom line

No cited reference anticipates any of Claims 1, 2, or 3 under 35 U.S.C. §102. The mapping shows a consistent gap:

The cited art is therefore §103 obviousness‑type art, not §102 anticipation art: the examiner appears to have assembled (a) a lip‑gloss/lip‑vehicle reference, (b) plant‑oil/oil‑body and botanical‑extract cosmetic references, and (c) separate appetite‑suppressant ingredient references (guarana, pine nut, caralluma, Hoodia), which are the classic ingredients of an obviousness combination.

Most relevant prior art — ranked

1. US 2003/0095936 A1 (Light) — the only cited reference in the lip‑gloss form with oil + wax; supplies all of Claim 2's structural limitations except the diet aid.
2. US 2004/0247702 A1 (Rajendran) — the only cited reference supplying Caralluma fimbriata as an appetite suppressant; the pivotal diet‑aid reference.
3. US 6,376,657 B1 (CSIR / Van Heerden) — the benchmark "naturally occurring appetite‑suppressant extract" reference (Hoodia/P57), and the closest prior art to the diet‑aid concept generally.
4. Lipid Nutrition "new ingredient" (PinnoThin / Korean pine nut) and the Greentech guarana sheets — the two NPL references that supply the pine nut and guarana limitations.
5. US 6,039,960 A (E‑L Management, wax‑based product) — same‑family wax‑vehicle art bearing on the oil/wax platform.

Caveats

• Verdicts of "no anticipation" rest on the claim language furnished in the authoritative patent text; I applied the closed three‑material list literally (a §102 reference would have to disclose a lipstick/lip gloss with oil + wax and one of those three).
• Items 7 (US 2,177,679) and 8 (US 5,407,665) are described from title/date only; I could not retrieve their full disclosures in this session, so treat those two descriptions as low‑confidence.
• To convert this into a formal validity opinion, the IFW (examiner's applied references and rejections) and the 98/92 rejection history for application 11/464,655 should be pulled directly from USPTO PatentCenter — I did not have database access here.

Sources: Google Patents record for US7247323B2 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US7247323/en); US20070042058A1; US20030095936A1; US20040247702A1 / US7390516B2 / US7976880B2; US6376657B1; US20020037303A1 / US7585645B2.

I'll verify what the cited prior-art references actually disclose before building the §103 combinations, since the strength of any obviousness case depends on what these references teach.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 7,247,323 B2

Under 35 U.S.C. § 103 (pre-AIA), using the prior art of record on the patent's own face

Builds on the identification/claims/litigation sections above; claim scope and bibliographic data are not repeated except where needed. No contradictions with the earlier sections were found. Minor flag: the framing header gives the date as 2026-09-30 while this task states April 26, 2026 — immaterial to the analysis, but noted per the cross-reference instruction.

1. Governing law and thresholds

The application was filed 2006-08-15 with a provisional priority of 2005-08-17 (US 60/708,995). Because it was filed before 2013-03-16, pre-AIA § 103(a) governs and the pre-AIA §§ 102(a)/(b)/(e)/(f) categories define the prior art. The critical date is therefore 2005-08-17 (with § 102(e) art measured by the reference's own U.S. filing date).

The controlling rubric is Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966) (scope/content of prior art; differences; PHOSITA level; objective indicia), as amplified by KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007). KSR matters here because the claims recite known elements arranged in a known way: an oil/wax lip matrix (old) + a natural appetite-suppressant/stimulant (old). KSR endorses: (i) combining familiar elements according to known methods where results are predictable; (ii) "obvious to try" where there is a design need and a finite number of predictable solutions; and (iii) using market demand/design incentives as motivation. MPEP §§ 2143, 2144.

Claim construction as it bears on obviousness. Both independent claims use "at least one of pine nut (Korean) seed oil, caralluma fimbriata stem extract, and guarana seed extract." Under the natural reading, a single one of the three satisfies the limitation. (Note the recognized § 112/claim-construction tension over "at least one of A, B and C" lists, Superguide Corp. v. DirecTV, 358 F.3d 870 (Fed. Cir. 2004); but both readings favor the obviousness case — if only one is required, one reference supplies it; if all three are required, the record supplies all three individually.) This is decisive: the claim is only one lip-base reference plus one diet-aid reference away from obvious.

2. Person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA)

A formulator with roughly 2–4 years' experience in cosmetic lip-product formulation (oil/wax stick and gel bases), working with, or having access to, nutraceutical/dietary-supplement literature on weight-management botanicals. This is a low-to-moderate skill level. Critically, KSR permits motivation to come from any field the artisan would reasonably consult — and here the two fields (lip cosmetics and oral nutraceuticals) were already converging (lip products are incidentally ingested; see § 5 below).

3. The prior art actually of record (grouped for the § 103 attack)

Cluster A — oil + wax lip vehicles (supply the vehicle elements)

Cluster B — natural diet aids (supply the "diet aid" element)

Prior-art-date caveat (flagged, not glossed over). Several of the examiner-cited NPLs bear retrieval dates after the 2005-08-17 priority date — Lipid Nutrition (retrieved 2006-08-04), Phytobase "Caralluma fimbriata" (retrieved 2006-08-04), Phytopharm "Hoodia Fact File" (retrieved 2006-10-18), Maxam "ANAVONE" (2006-10-18), Yerba Mate (2006-11-14). Their public-availability dates are not established by the face of the record, so I would not rest the § 103 case on them. The durable art is the patent publications with 1995–2004 dates (Light, Rajendran, CSIR '657, P&G '665) plus the pre-2005 guarana literature.

4. The § 103 combinations, claim by claim

Claim 2 (lip gloss) — the most vulnerable claim

Combination: Light US 2003/0095936 A1 + Rajendran US 2004/0247702 A1.

• Light discloses every structural element of the vehicle: a lip gloss with naturally occurring oils and naturally occurring waxes (beeswax, ozokerite, microcrystalline wax) and botanicals.
• Rajendran discloses Caralluma fimbriata extract as an appetite suppressant and, expressly, as a food additive/nutraceutical, i.e., an orally-administered naturally occurring diet aid.
• Result: a lip gloss comprising natural oil + natural wax + naturally occurring diet aid (caralluma fimbriata extract) — i.e., claim 2.

Motivation (KSR/MPEP 2143 rationales):

1. Known problem → known solution. Rajendran itself supplies the need ("treatment and management of obesity… using the Caralluma extracts") and supplies the solution in an oral-consumption context ("food additives," "nutraceutical and food"). KSR, 550 U.S. at 421.
2. Same field of endeavor / reasonable consultation. Light's lip gloss is expressly a skin/lip treatment product ("healing effect on chapped lips"); a formulator formulating a treatment lip product would consult the nutraceutical/weight-management literature — a field KSR would find reasonably pertinent to the problem of obesity management.
3. Predictable result. Adding a botanical extract to a hot-cast oil/wax matrix is routine cosmetic compounding; the claims require no new property or result from the combination.
4. Finite number of predictable solutions / obvious to try. The record narrows the candidate diet aids to a small list (Hoodia, guarana, caralluma, pine nut, yerba maté, green tea). Where "there are a finite number of identified, predictable solutions, a person of ordinary skill has good reason to pursue the known options." KSR; MPEP § 2144.04.

Claim 1 (lipstick) — same logic with a stick base

Combination: a lipstick base (US 2,177,679 "Coverlet"; US 5,407,665; or the applicant's own concession that lipstick formulation is well known) + any one of the three named diet aids.

• The claim requires only a lipstick base + oil + wax + at least one of {pine nut (Korean) seed oil, caralluma fimbriata stem extract, guarana seed extract}.
• Guarana gives the cleanest single-reference-plus-base case: guarana seed's stimulant/thermogenic/lipolysis properties and its use in weight-loss supplements were documented before 2005 (Greentech 1998; Amazing Nature 2002; Boozer 2001). A POSITA putting a known natural thermogenic botanical into a known lipstick base yields claim 1.
• Alternatively, Rajendran (caralluma) or CSIR '657 (Hoodia) supply the diet-aid element with a 2002/2004 date.

Claim 3 (dependent; six-component blend) — narrower, still likely obvious

Combination: light/gloss base + known individual weight-management actives: lecithin + Korean pine nut seed oil + caralluma fimbriata stem extract + ribes nigrum extract + guarana seed extract + isomerized safflower glycerides.

• Each recited active independently existed in the weight-management art: guarana (stimulant/thermogenic), caralluma (Rajendran — appetite suppressant), Korean pine nut oil (pinolenic-acid satiety ingredient), isomerized safflower glycerides (conjugated-linoleic-acid/CLA-type fat-management material), lecithin (a staple lip/food emulsifier listed among the patent's own "diet aid"/formulation materials), and ribes nigrum (black currant) extract (the specification itself lists black currant as a diuretic/laxative diet aid).
• Motivation: the record and general practice recognized stacking complementary functional categories (thermogenic + appetite suppressant + diuretic) in a single weight-management product — the specification's own "Exemplary blends" show this was a conventional strategy, and the cited art (e.g., Boozer 2001 combining Ma Huang + guarana; Rajendran contemplating additional therapeutic ingredients and additives) reflects it. Combining such known actives in a known vehicle is the paradigmatic KSR "combination of familiar elements according to known methods."
• Assessment: claim 3 is the strongest validity position for the patentee because it is specific, but it remains likely obvious given the finiteness of the known ingredient list and the absence of any asserted unexpected synergy. If the patentee could show an unexpected synergistic appetite-suppressant effect from this exact six-way blend, that would rebut; the specification, however, supplies no comparative or synergy data.

5. The linchpin rationale: incidental ingestion of lip products

The motivation to put a diet aid in a lip product (rather than, say, a lotion) rests on the documented fact that lip products are incidentally ingested. Two supports:

1. Applicant admission in the specification itself — "It is common for users of lip products to lick or bite their lips routinely, thereby possibly ingesting some lip product throughout the day." Statements in the specification about what was known are usable as applicant admissions about the state of the art.
2. Regulatory/practical art knowledge — lip colorants must be safe for ingestion; lipsticks are conventionally treated as articles that contact and enter the mouth (the patent's own claims/classification group with A61Q1/06 lipsticks and A23L33/30 dietetic weight-loss methods).

Honest limitation: this ingestion premise is general knowledge rather than a specific teaching in the four strongest § 102(b) references. A rigorous obviousness challenge would want a reference or declaration establishing it. The applicant admission mitigates this gap substantially.

6. Anticipation is not available — this is a § 103 case

No single reference of record discloses a lipstick or lip gloss containing any of the three named diet aids. Anticipation therefore fails; the correct ground is § 103. But because the claims require only one diet aid and use functionally-defined "naturally occurring oil/wax" elements, the gap between the prior art and the claims is a two-reference gap, the classic case for KSR.

7. Anticipated patentee counterarguments and their weaknesses

8. Bottom-line assessment

The single strongest two-reference attack is: US 2003/0095936 A1 (Light) in view of US 2004/0247702 A1 (Rajendran) — both published before the 2005-08-17 priority date, and together they supply every element of claim 2, with the motivation supplied by Rajendran's own teaching that caralluma extract is an appetite suppressant intended for oral intake (food/nutraceutical use).

9. Confidence and open items

• Confidence: High that the claims would be held prima facie obvious; Moderate-to-high on ultimate invalidity, contingent on whether the patentee could adduce unexpected-results evidence (none currently in the record).
• Not verified in this session: the full texts of US 5,407,665, US 2,177,679, the Derwent acc. 2001-112573 / Green et al. item (subject matter not identified), and US 2003/0054015; I reasoned from titles, abstracts, classifications, and the examiner's citation pattern. I also did not retrieve the prosecution file wrapper, so I cannot confirm which references the examiner relied on for § 102 vs. § 103, or whether the allowance rested on the "no reference teaches the combination" rationale.
• Notable record pattern: the examiner cited references evidencing each of the three named diet aids individually (Rajendran and Phytobase for caralluma; Greentech/Boozer/Amazing Nature for guarana; Lipid Nutrition for pine nut) and still allowed claims naming exactly those three. That pattern is consistent with a weak file history in which the applicant's only distinction was "these actives have not been placed in a lip product" — a rationale that does not survive KSR. I would want the file wrapper to confirm.
• Caveat on NPL dates: as flagged in § 3, several cited non-patent items carry post-priority retrieval dates and should not be counted as prior art on the present record.