US 10041866

I'll search for this specific patent number across the requested sources.

Search Results — US Patent No. 10,041,866

Important scope note: I searched for the exact number "10041866." My searches surfaced the Google Patents, Justia, and USPTO-report records for US 10,041,866 B2 (and its sibling US 9,885,147 B2), but I found no litigation docket or CAFC appeal involving this patent. The CAFC/docket results my searches returned (e.g., Shenzhen Jisu Technology v. various, Power2B v. Samsung, Gamevice/Nintendo, Boxcast v. Resi Media, Hanshow/SES-Imagotag) involve unrelated patent numbers and are not associated with US 10,041,866. I therefore cannot confirm any 2026 CAFC docket activity for this patent — treat the absence of litigation as "none found," not as a verified negative.

Bibliographic Data (from the patent record itself)

Note: the sibling application 15/136,217 → US 9,885,147 B2 (granted 2018-02-06) shares the same title, priority, and assignee, and is listed as "Expired – Fee Related." It is a distinct patent with a different claim set (it claims a mask-based application method with a stain applied to a target area), so it should not be conflated with US 10,041,866.

Abstract (verbatim)

"A stain-barrier is described along with methods of its application to a fabric. The stain barrier reduces variability between samples of different dilution or fabric type so that limits of stain detection can be assigned more accurately and precisely and stain detection techniques can be transparently compared."

Plain-Language Overview of the Independent Claim

Claim 1 is the sole independent claim; all others (2–18) depend from it (directly or via claim 2 or 17). In plain terms, claim 1 covers:

1. Printing a filament onto a first surface of a fabric, where the filament is made of an inert polymeric composition (e.g., a low-melting polymer such as polylactic acid (PLA) or polycaprolactone); and
2. Cooling that composition so it forms an inert polymeric coating within the fabric, arranged so that the sample area is completely surrounded by the coating (i.e., a printed ring/barrier that confines a subsequently applied liquid to a defined region and blocks it from wicking out).

The point of the invention is reproducibility: by 3D-printing a polymer barrier that impregnates the fabric and encircles a defined sample area, differences in how a liquid (e.g., a blood dilution) spreads on different fabrics or at different dilutions are held constant, enabling fair comparison of stain-detection techniques.

What the Dependent Claims Add (grouped)

• Thermal/extrusion parameters (claims 2–6, 17): extrusion temperature above the polymer's glass-transition temperature; extrusion temp ~100–200 °C (more narrowly ~125–150 °C); polymer Tg ~50–100 °C; and variants where the polymer's melting temperature is above, or below, the extrusion temperature.
• Materials (claims 7, 18): polymer comprising polylactic acid; or a homopolymer of 2-oxepanone (polycaprolactone).
• Fabric/coating geometry (claims 8–11): printing on both the first and second opposite surfaces; the composition saturating the fabric around the sample area; woven fabric; and fabric of cotton, nylon, polyester, silk, or mixtures.
• Processing (claims 12, 14–16): cooling at below ~100 °C; preheating the fabric within 20% of extrusion temperature; heating during printing within 20% of extrusion temperature; and post-print heating sufficient to soften/flow the polymer through the fabric thickness.
• End use (claim 13): applying a blood sample to the sample area, where the blood saturates the fabric in the area but is prevented from migrating out by the inert coating.

Confidence and Caveats

• The title, assignee, inventors, dates, abstract, and claim structure are drawn directly from the authoritative patent text and corroborated by Google Patents and Justia; high confidence.
• The current legal status / expiration (2036-12-21) is per the record's stated assumption ("the legal status is an assumption and is not a legal conclusion") — moderate confidence.
• No litigation or CAFC 2026 docket entry for US 10,041,866 was found. If a specific 2026 CAFC matter exists, I do not have authoritative confirmation of it, and I am not asserting one.
• There is a minor inconsistency in the record regarding inventor Stephanie Dejong's residence (Ripon, CA per Justia vs. the University of South Carolina context); I have not resolved this and flag it as uncertain.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 10041866 across patent litigation databases.

Let me try more targeted searches on patent litigation databases.

Let me run additional targeted searches to confirm whether any litigation exists.

Litigation Search Results: US Patent No. 10,041,866

Bottom line

I found no record of any litigation (district court, ITC, or CAFC appeal) involving US Patent No. 10,041,866. I also found no PTAB post-grant proceedings (IPR/PGR/CBM) challenging it. Based on the sources searched, this patent appears to be litigation-free.

What US 10,041,866 is (context for why this is unsurprising)

• Title: "Reproducible sample preparation method for quantitative stain detection"
• Assignee: University of South Carolina (original and current)
• Application No.: 15/136,252 | Filed: 2016-04-22 | Granted: 2018-08-07
• Priority: 2015-04-24 (provisional 62/152,075)
• Claim type: A method of forming a sample area on a fabric by 3D-printing an inert polymeric (e.g., polylactic acid / polycaprolactone) filament onto the fabric and cooling it to form an inert polymeric coating that surrounds the sample area — used to create reproducible bloodstain samples for forensic detection-limit studies.
• Government interest: Made with NIJ support under 2011-IJ-CX-K055.
• Status: Active; adjusted expiration 2036-12-21. Maintenance fee paid (4th yr, 2022); next fee reminder mailed 2026-03-30.

This is a niche academic forensic-science research tool patent. It is not a commercially asserted patent, and its assignee is a public university with no history (that I could find) of asserting this patent.

Sources searched and limitations (stated explicitly, per your rules)

I ran searches targeting patent-litigation databases and sources (Unified Patents litigation portal–style queries, CourtListener/CAFC feeds, and general web searches keyed to "10041866" and "10,041,866" combined with litigation, lawsuit, defendant, and PTAB terms). Every query returned no matching case. Returning hits referenced other patents (e.g., US 7,281,135, US 10,311,073, US 9,253,239, US 7,454,002) and unrelated parties, not US 10,041,866.

Important caveats — I do not want to overstate confidence:

1. I was unable to directly load the Unified Patents caselist portal or PACER in this session; my results come from general/indexed search rather than a direct docket query. A litigation-filing that is not well-indexed could theoretically be missed.
2. I found no affirmative filing to cite as evidence of a case, which is consistent with (but not conclusive proof of) zero litigation.
3. Only the patent's own Google Patents page and family/prosecution data appeared — those show no "Litigation" or "PTAB" section, which further supports the no-litigation conclusion.

Recommendation for definitive confirmation

To close the residual uncertainty, a direct docket check is warranted:

• PACER / CourtListener RECAP: search party "University of South Carolina" and the patent number 10,041,866.
• Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation) — filter by patent number 10041866.
• USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board and USPTO Patent Assignment / Global Dossier for any post-grant filings or transfers.

If none of those return results, the conclusion stands: no known litigation involving US Patent 10,041,866 as of April 26, 2026.

I'll verify the PTAB docket status with web searches before writing anything up.

Let me run a few more targeted searches to be thorough before concluding.

Let me check the sibling patent in this family and any related litigation, since that's a common source of PTAB filings.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings — no IPR, PGR, or CBM — have been filed against US 10041866. The canonical structured block for this patent states that the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no AIA trial proceedings as of the most recent ingest, and my independent web searches surfaced no petition, institution decision, Final Written Decision, or CAFC appeal naming this patent. The breakdown is therefore: 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is neutral, not favorable: there is no invalidating FWD to lean on and no estoppel record to exploit, but the complete absence of PTAB activity also means the patent's claims have never been tested — nothing has been canceled, and all 18 claims stand unadjudicated. A defendant's IPR would be a first-challenge, not a follow-on.

Detailed search of record

I looked specifically for the artifacts a proceeding would leave behind and found none:

• Petition naming the patent — nothing. The only US10041866 strings returned by search are incidental: citations to this patent on the Google Patents pages of unrelated patents (e.g., US 7,123,360; US 7,551,285; US 2007/0252711), and a Wanfang Data record whose US10041866 is an unrelated 2002 Chinese database identifier, not this patent.
• PTAB EA2E / PTAB Decisions docket — no hits for this number.
• Federal Circuit / CourtListener — no appeal or opinion referencing US 10041866.
• District court assertion — no complaint found naming this patent. (Searches were constrained; see caveats below.)

Caution — one family member worth a separate check

The Google Patents "Similar Documents" table lists US 9,885,147 B2, titled "Reproducible sample preparation method for quantitative stain detection," same assignee (University of South Carolina), publication date 2018-02-06 — i.e., a sibling in the same family. I did not complete a dedicated PTAB check on the '147 patent before reaching my search limit, so I cannot state whether proceedings exist there. If you are clearing this family, run '147 through PTAB E2E independently; a challenge filed against the sibling would not appear in the '866 docket but could signal a broader validity attack on the shared specification.

Strategic summary

Nothing is canceled; nothing is sustained; nothing is adjudicated. All 18 claims of US 10041866 — independent claim 1 and its dependents, including the blood-sample method claims 13–16 and the polycaprolactone claims 17–18 — remain in force in their originally issued form. The patent's legal status in the ODP block reads "Active, expires 2036-12-21" (adjusted expiration reflecting the 2016-04-22 filing date plus term adjustment), with a 4th-year maintenance fee paid on 2022-01-13 and a maintenance-fee reminder mailed 2026-03-30 — so the owner is current and the patent is not at risk of lapse for non-payment in the near term. Because no claim has been challenged, there is no narrowing to map: the claim set you must design around or invalidate is the full original set, and the strongest claims-invalidated argument is unavailable because it does not exist.

Estoppel landscape is empty — which cuts both ways. No petitioner has been subjected to § 315(e)(2) estoppel on this patent, so there is no pre-screened ground set that a prior petitioner has already burned. That means a defendant retains maximum freedom to select art, but gains no benefit from someone else's work: you cannot piggyback on a prior petitioner's obviousness combination, expert declaration, or claim-construction wins. Equally, you face no § 315(a)(1) bar from an earlier-filed DJ action and no § 325(e)(1) estoppel within the Office. If you file an IPR, you will be the first to litigate claim 1's "printing a filament," "inert polymeric composition," and "completely surrounded" limitations — all three of which are broad, functional-flavored phrases that look vulnerable to § 112 and to art-based attack using conventional 3D-printing-on-textile references.

Pattern signals are uniformly absent. No single petitioner has filed multiple IPRs here; the patent owner has not appeared as an appellant at the Federal Circuit in any matter involving this number; and there is no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, or similar) in the chain — consistent with the low commercial profile of the technology. The patent is university-owned forensic-sample-preparation subject matter (government-funded under NIJ award 2011-IJ-CX-K055, per the specification's Government Support Clause), a class of patents that is disproportionately licensed or dormant rather than asserted. The absence of IPRs is therefore best read as no one has found it worth attacking, not as it has survived attack — a meaningful distinction when assessing litigation risk.

Recommended next steps

• There is no FWD to link to, because none exists. I will not manufacture a proceeding number or a disposition. If you need a negative-clearance artifact for a file, the citable record is the absence of entries in PTAB E2E for US 10041866 — the search string https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/ → Patent Number 10041866 should return an empty trials list.
• Confirm the negative directly, then widen. Re-run PTAB E2E in a few weeks to catch recently filed petitions the ODP ingest may not yet reflect (a petition can be filed and not appear in structured feeds for a period). In the same pass, check US 9,885,147 B2 (sibling) and any continuation in the family, since a challenger would likely attack the family together.
• If you are the defendant, the posture is set your way — file first if you intend to file. With no earlier petitioner on file, there is no § 315(b) one-year bar already triggered by your service of a complaint on someone else, and no § 315(e) estoppel constraining your grounds. The trial clock, once instituted, is the statutory one year from institution under § 316(a)(11); institution decisions issue within roughly six months of the petition's filing date under § 314(b). Budget for those two milestones.
• Weigh the § 314(a)/Fintiv posture carefully if there is parallel litigation. Because the patent appears unasserted, there is likely no parallel district court case to trigger discretionary denial — which is favorable to institution. But verify: a just-filed complaint you did not find in my searches would change the Fintiv calculus entirely, particularly the proximity of the trial date to the Board's statutory FWD deadline.
• The absence of PTAB activity is itself the signal. Well-asserted patents attract IPRs, usually within a year or two of the first infringement complaint. The clean PTAB docket on a patent granted 2018-08-07 and still active in 2026 suggests either (a) a licensing-only, non-asserted enforcement strategy, or (b) a patent whose commercial relevance has not yet drawn a well-funded challenger. If a demand letter arrives citing this patent, the fact that no competitor has bothered to invalidate it in eight-plus years is a negotiating datapoint — not proof of strength.

Confidence and caveats: I have high confidence in the "no PTAB proceedings" conclusion, because it is corroborated by the canonical ODP-derived structured block and by independent searching. I have lower confidence on the negative findings for district court litigation and for the sibling patent US 9,885,147 B2, because my searches were cut off by a step limit and I could not complete a dedicated docket check on either. Treat those as "not found" rather than "confirmed absent," and verify before relying on them in a client communication.

I'll research the assignment chain for US 10,041,866, starting with the USPTO Assignment Center and cross-referencing sources.

Let me dig into the specific assignment record and any downstream transfers.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US Patent No. 10,041,866 B2

Source basis note: I was not able to load the USPTO Assignment Center UI (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov) directly in this session; the assignment data below is drawn from the patent record's own legal-events block (Google Patents mirror of the USPTO assignment record) plus corroborating searches. I flag where the record is silent rather than filling gaps.

Bottom line up front: The Assignment Center record for this patent contains exactly one recorded assignment — the original inventor→university transfer (Reel 038356/0558). There are no post-issuance assignments, no security interests, no mergers, and no NPE transfers. This is a single-link chain.

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check — negative. I found no evidence of inventors departing the assignee within 12 months of filing, and no evidence of a portfolio fire-sale. To the contrary: USC's technology-commercialization portal (techfinder.sc.edu / canberra-ip.technologypublisher.com) still lists this invention live, and the sibling listing (Ref. #01146) carries an expanded inventor roster (adding Alena Bensussan, Jennifer Martin, Wayne O'Brien, Mackenzie Meece-Rayle) — consistent with a continuing, retained research program, not a departing-inventor fire-sale. Reference "#01152 — Reproducible Sample Preparation Using 3D Printing" is a separate but related USC disclosure.

Original assignee

University of South Carolina (original assignee on the issued patent, and — per the record — still the owner).

• Entity type / line of business: public research university (state institution); the relevant unit is its technology-transfer / commercialization office (USC Technology Commercialization Office, fronted online as "TechFinder," operated on the canberra-ip.technologypublisher.com platform).
• Product embodying the claims: No. The claims cover a laboratory sample-preparation method (3D-printing an inert polymer barrier onto fabric to define a stain sample area). It is a research/forensic-method patent, not a commercial article. USC is a non-manufacturing assignee.
• Current status: Operating — the university is intact and actively offering the technology for license (USC TechFinder listings Ref. #01146 and #01152 are currently live, with listing update dates of 2025-05-15 and 2026-03-18 respectively). No bankruptcy, no dissolution, no acquisition.
• Government interest: made with NIJ support under award 2011-IJ-CX-K055 (per the patent's Government Support Clause) — relevant to any future transfer, since a government-interest patent carries march-in/notification considerations, another reason universities rarely transfer these outright.

Assignment timeline

• 2015-05-02 → 2015-05-18 (executed; signing dates span this range) / recorded 2016-04-22 — Reel 038356/0558
  • Conveyance: Assignment (Assignment of Assignors' Interest)
  • Assignor: Zhenyu Lu; Brianna Cassidy; Katherine Witherspoon; Stephanie Dejong; Raymond G. Belliveau, III; Michael Myrick; Stephen L. Morgan (individual inventors)
  • Assignee: University of South Carolina (South Carolina)
  • Correspondent: ⚠️ Not captured in the record text I could retrieve. The legal-events entry gives the assignment's substantive detail ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS' INTEREST; ASSIGNORS: WITHERSPOON, KATHERINE; BELLIVEAU, RAYMOND; DEJONG, STEPHANIE; MYRICK, MICHAEL; CASSIDY, BRIANNA; MORGAN, STEPHEN L.; LU, ZHENYU; REEL/FRAME:038356/0558") but does not surface the recording correspondent/attorney of record in the text available to me. I will not invent one. Given the assignee is a university, the correspondent is almost certainly the university's in-house tech-transfer counsel or its outside IP firm — but that is an inference, not a record citation.
  • Context: Initial inventor-to-employer assignment — the standard, expected first link in a university-owned patent chain. Note the assignment was executed roughly a year before the non-provisional was filed (2016-04-22), and immediately after the 2015-04-24 provisional — normal university practice.

No further links found. Specifically, I found no change-of-name, security agreement, merger, license recording, release, correction, or outright assignment after the 2016 recording. The Google Patents legal-events block likewise shows only the single ASSIGNMENT(AS) event plus prosecution/maintenance-fee events.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10041866
    2015 : Provisional filed 2015-04-24
         : Inventors assign rights to USC
    2016 : Assignment recorded Reel 038356/0558
         : Non-provisional filed 2016-04-22
    2018 : Patent issued to University of South Carolina
    2026 : Still owned by USC
         : Offered for license via TechFinder

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data — more precisely, a single-link chain with the original assignee still in place.

The only recorded assignment is the initial inventor-to-university conveyance at Reel 038356/0558 (executed 2015-05-02 to 2015-05-18; recorded 2016-04-22), and no assignment, security interest, merger, or transfer has been recorded since. Because there are no post-issuance records at all, the NPE/privateering tests are not merely failed — they are inapplicable: USC remains the owner, does not sell a product embodying the claims, and instead offers the method for license via its TechFinder portal (Refs. #01146 and #01152, listings live as of 2025–2026). Per the task's own decision rule, "no records, or only the original assignment" maps to Insufficient data, so no NPE label is warranted.

Residual uncertainties (stated, not papered over):

1. The recording correspondent for Reel 038356/0558 was not retrievable from the sources available to me — this is the one field that would most strengthen a repeat-player analysis, and it is genuinely missing rather than "clean."
2. My access to the Assignment Center UI was indirect. I found no contrary evidence, but a direct Reel/Frame lookup is the confirmatory step.

Verification links:

• USPTO Assignment Center: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 10041866; also https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html)
• Google Patents legal events: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10041866/en
• USC TechFinder listings (owner's licensing posture): http://www.techfinder.sc.edu/searchresults.aspx?q=zhenyu+lu&type=i

I'll research this patent's prior art. Let me start with targeted searches on the patent and its cited references.

Let me dig deeper into the specific cited references and the sibling patent.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent No. 10,041,866 B2

Note on scope and method. Per the authoritative patent text, the record lists 58 cited patent documents (the "Patent Citations (58)" set) plus 30 non-patent citations. Below I first state the legal baseline, then prioritize the references by relevance, then give a complete citation-by-citation table with a §102 assessment. Consistent with your rules, I have not auto-corrected any identifier; where the record's number collides with a different document found in search, I flag it rather than silently fixing it.

1. What a §102 reference would have to disclose

Claim 1 (the only independent claim) requires, in combination:

• (a) printing a filament onto a first surface of a fabric, the filament comprising an inert polymeric composition; and
• (b) cooling that composition to form an inert polymeric coating in the fabric such that the sample area is completely surrounded by the coating.

Anticipation under 35 U.S.C. §102 requires a single reference that discloses every element arranged as claimed (Net MoneyIN v. VeriSign; MPEP 2131). Because the application has an effective filing date of 2015-04-24 / 2016-04-22, it is a post-AIA case; all cited documents predate it and are available as §102(a)(1) (patented/published) and §102(a)(2) (published US applications) art. The question is whether any actually teaches the claimed printing-a-polymer-barrier-into-fabric method.

Bottom line up front: None of the 58 cited patent documents discloses 3D-printing a polymeric filament onto fabric to form an inert coating that impregnis the fabric and surrounds a sample area. No cited reference anticipates any of claims 1–18. The citations fall into (i) a small group of fabric/liquid-handling references that are the closest but still fail §102, and (ii) a large group of the assignee's own and third-party optical-computing/spectroscopy patents that are non-analogous art to the claimed textile-printing method.

Contradiction flag: The "Prior art keywords" on the record are fabric, temperature, inert polymeric, polymer, polymeric composition — i.e., the real field of the claims. Yet ~45 of the 58 citations are optics/spectroscopy references (see the heavily USC-owned block). This is characteristic of an examiner leveraging the assignee's (University of South Carolina's) large optical-computing portfolio rather than true field-of-invention art. Anyone re-analyzing validity should treat the optics citations as largely irrelevant to claim 1.

2. The most relevant cited art (fabric / liquid-handling / forensic trace)

These are the only citations whose subject matter even touches the claimed field. Even these do not anticipate.

Also of note (applicant's own, not cited): the sibling US 9,885,147 B2 (app. 15/136,217; mask-based application of a barrier composition, PVC/resin + solvent, pub. 2018‑02‑06) is a distinct claim set, not a §102 reference against 10,041,866 (common inventive entity/assignee; not "by another"). It is a §102(a)(2)-type concern only if it qualified as "by another," which it does not — flag for completeness.

3. Full citation-by-citation table (§102 assessment for all 58)

Notation: "F/P" = filing (or priority) / publication date as listed on the record. All assessments: no §102 anticipation unless noted. "Non-analogous" = field unrelated to claims 1–18.

4. Non-patent citations (30) — brief note

The 30 NPL items are a coherent forensic-science set on bloodstain age estimation and presumptive-test sensitivity (e.g., Andrasko 1997 HPLC; Bremmer 2012 review; Blum 2006 luminol; Budowle 2000 fluorescein; Webb 2006; Tobe 2007; Hanson 2010 Soret-band shift; Edelman 2012 NIR; the applicant's own Lu 2015 AAFS abstract; etc.). They establish the problem (irreproducible stains → widely divergent detection limits) that claim 1 solves, and are relevant for motivation/background, but none discloses the claimed printed-polymer-barrier method, so none anticipates any claim.

5. Conclusions, confidence, and caveats

1. Most relevant cited art (ranked): US 2003/0124936 A1 (Potts) > US 2009/0240222 A1 (Uni‑Charm) > US 7,489,252 / 7,595,734 (Kimberly‑Clark) > US 7,671,975 (CaridianBCT) > the ChemImage/forensic and Van Berkel references. All are fabric/fluid-handling or forensic-detection art — the only citations that even share a field with the claims.
2. §102 result: No cited patent reference anticipates any of claims 1–18. The single-reference "all elements" test fails because none discloses (a) printing a polymeric filament onto fabric and (b) cooling to form an inert coating that impregnates the fabric and encircles the sample area. The closest references (Potts, Uni‑Charm) are, at most, §103 candidates and even then only weakly (different mechanism: fiber treatment/density control vs. printed polymer micro-barrier; different purpose: absorbency/leakage vs. reproducible sample-area definition).
3. Non-analogous majority: ~45 of the 58 citations are optical-computing/spectroscopy documents — many owned by the same assignee (Univ. of South Carolina) — and are not analogous art to a textile sample-preparation method.
4. Identifier caution (literal reading preserved): The record cites US 2003/0124936 A1 (Potts, "Absorbent article with fluid treatment agent," pub. 2003‑07‑03). Web search also returns a similarly-numbered US 2013/0124936 A1 ("Tap and linking module…JTAG"), an unrelated document; these are different publications (2003 vs. 2013) and must not be conflated. The listed priority date "1998‑10‑30" for the Potts publication is inconsistent with its shown 2001‑12‑28 filing in secondary sources — I flag this rather than resolve it.

Caveats on confidence. The bibliographic data, claim structure, and citation list are drawn from the authoritative patent text (high confidence). The §102 assessments above are based on the references' titles, assignees, dates, and known subject matter — I was not able to open and read every full reference specification within this session's search budget, so each "no anticipation" call is a judgment (moderate-to-high confidence) that should be confirmed by reading the full text of the closest references (esp. Potts and Uni‑Charm) end-to-end. A definitive validity/anticipation opinion would also require a separate search of non-cited art (e.g., 3D-printing-on-textile and lab-on-fabric/paper-microfluidics literature), which is outside the "each cited reference" scope requested here.

I'll ground this analysis by checking what the cited references actually teach before building combinations.

Obviousness Analysis — US 10,041,866 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Scope and method. I analyzed the claim set against the references listed in the "Citations (56)/(58)" and "Non-Patent Citations (30)" sections of the patent record, verified the technical content of the most relevant ones by pulling their own specifications, and applied the Graham v. John Deere / KSR Int'l v. Teleflex framework. Where the cited art does not squarely meet a limitation, I say so rather than stretching it. This builds on — and does not repeat — the prior summary, litigation, PTAB, and strategic sections; nothing in those sections contradicts what follows.

Bottom line up front: Claims 1–18 are vulnerable to § 103, but not on the cited art alone. The single most dangerous reference is US 2011/0284735 A1 (Van Berkel) — cited by the examiner — which discloses a hydrophobic barrier embedded in a fabric/paper absorptive layer that completely surrounds a blood sample region to prevent lateral diffusion, where the barrier is patterned to form wells before the sample is deposited. That reference meets every substantive element of claim 1 except the word "printing a filament." That gap is filled by the applicant's own admission that 3D printers capable of depositing a polymer filament are commercially available (spec., citing the MakerBot® Replicator 2), which is admitted prior art and, under KSR, may supply a missing element that is "a predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions."

1. The person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA)

A POSITA here is a forensic-science/analytical-chemistry researcher (or a textile-coating engineer working with such a researcher) with a bachelor's degree in chemistry, materials science, or textile engineering plus 2–3 years of experience, familiar with: (a) presumptive blood-detection reagents and their detection-limit variability (luminol, Bluestar®, fluorescein); (b) FT-IR and NIR spectroscopy of bloodstains; (c) fused-deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing and its standard filaments (PLA, polycaprolactone); and (d) applying polymer coatings/barriers to textiles. The patent's own "Background" confirms this skill profile — the applicant frames the entire problem in terms of dilution-spreading and substrate effects on fabric.

2. Key claim-construction touchpoints

3. Claim 1 — element-by-element mapping to the primary combination

Proposed combination A: Van Berkel '735 (primary) + the admitted knowledge of FDM 3D printing (spec. § re MakerBot® Replicator 2) + forensic-NPL motivation (Bremmer; Botonjic-Sehic; Tobe; Webb; Middlestead).

Motivation to combine (Van Berkel + FDM). Both references are directed to the same problem the '866 patent identifies in its own Background: uncontrolled spreading of a liquid biological sample on an absorptive substrate. Van Berkel states the goal of obtaining "a constant analysis volume … when accurate pipetting of sample is not practical" and of preventing "lateral outward diffusion" (¶¶[0047], [0067]). The '866 Background states that "the more dilute a liquid, the further the liquid spreads," that "a liquid of the same dilution and volume will spread to a smaller area on densely packed cotton than on a loosely woven silk," and that this has "made experiments of this nature hugely imprecise." A POSITA confronting exactly that problem would be motivated to (i) adopt Van Berkel's peripheral-barrier approach and (ii) replace imprecise hand-spraying/dipping with the commercially available, numerically controlled FDM printer the applicant itself identifies, because FDM offers the predictable benefit of precisely placing a patterned barrier outline. That is the KSR paradigm of "a known technique … improv[ing] similar devices in the same way."

Reasonable expectation of success. High. FDM of a ring/well outline on an absorbent web to confine a liquid is the routine use of a known extrusion technique; the only engineering variables (extrusion temperature, bead width, number of perimeters) are standard FDM settings.

4. Dependent-claim analysis

5. Where the art genuinely falls short (the non-obviousness case)

I will not overstate the rejection. Four honest weaknesses exist:

1. "Printing a filament" is nowhere in the cited art. Van Berkel applies the barrier by "spray coating … immersion … spin coating," or by "melting, painting, or spraying" waxes (¶¶[0046], [0055]). The '866 claim requires a printed filament. The bridge is the applicant's own admission of commercial FDM printers — an admission that is prior art and citable, but a rejection built on it is more fragile than one built on a printed-filament reference. The strongest art is missing from the IDS: no cited reference discloses FDM 3D printing onto a textile.
2. "Inert" polymeric vs. hydrophobic treatment. Van Berkel's barrier materials are characterized by hydrophobicity (function), not inertness to a forensic analyte. A patentee can argue that silicone/wax barriers are chemically active surface treatments, whereas claim 1 recites an "inert" composition — though Van Berkel's no-matrix-effect teaching blunts this.
3. The absorbent-article art arguably teaches away. Potts '936, Uni-Charm '222, and Kimberly-Clark '7489252/'7595734 are directed to absorbing and distributing fluid, not confining it. A patentee could argue these references point away from creating a liquid-tight ring that blocks wicking. (Counter: those same references — Uni-Charm's leak-barrier cuffs, Kimberly-Clark's liquid-triggered barrier films — expressly teach containment, so the art as a whole is not one-directional.)
4. No cited reference expressly recites the full-thickness "coating in the fabric." Van Berkel's "embedded" barrier gets close, but whether "embedding a sprayed hydrophobic material" equals "cooling a printed filament to form a coating" is a factual dispute suited to a § 112/indefiniteness fight as much as a § 103 fight.

6. Secondary considerations and the KSR overlay

• Long-felt but unmet need — cuts toward obviousness. The NPL itself documents years of unresolved variability: Bremmer ("Forensic quest for age determination of bloodstains"), Botonjic-Sehic, Tobe, Webb, and Middlestead ("Sensitivity of the luminol test with blue denim," i.e., a substrate-dependent result). The existence of a long-recognized need increases the motivation to combine, per KSR.
• The solution was not the subject of the cited art's "teaching away." No reference criticizes barrier-printing on fabric.
• No evidence of unexpected results appears in the specification; the stated benefit (reduced sample-to-sample variability) is precisely the result Van Berkel already attributes to its peripheral barrier. That alignment favors obviousness.
• "Predictable use of prior art elements" — KSR: "if a technique has been used to improve one device, and a person of ordinary skill in the art would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way, using the technique is obvious unless its actual application is beyond his or her skill." Substituting FDM for spraying to place the same ring in the same fabric is squarely within that rule.

7. Confidence and cross-reference flags

• High confidence that Van Berkel '735 teaches a barrier that "completely surrounds" a fabric-borne blood sample (verified from the reference's own specification, patents.google.com/patent/US20110284735; granted as US 9,063,047).
• High confidence that Potts '936 = US 6,867,344 (Kimberly-Clark) is a fluid-treatment-agent absorbent article, and Uni-Charm '222 concerns shaped/fiber-density-controlled fluid spread — neither is a 3D-printing reference.
• Moderate confidence in the overall § 103 conclusion, because the decisive limitation ("printing a filament … coating in the fabric") is supplied by admitted prior art rather than by a cited printed-filament reference. A challenger should run the IDS gap: search FDM-on-textile and 3D-printed microfluidic/paper-barrier art (e.g., printed wax barriers on paper, which post-date and predate Van Berkel). That art, not the cited set, is where a clean § 103 rejection lives.
• Consistency with prior sections: the "no litigation / no PTAB" findings are unaffected. Note also that the patent record's own "Similar Documents" already surfaces sibling US 9,885,147 B2 (same title, same priority, same assignee). Because it shares the 2015-04-24 priority, the '147 patent is not § 102/§ 103 prior art to the '866 patent — but the shared claim scope raises a separate obviousness-type double patenting exposure worth a dedicated check (a reference the examiner's citation list does not, and cannot, address).