Dental Monitoring SAS v. Align Technology, Inc.

Dental Monitoring v. Align Technology, decided August 10th, 2026. A precedential panel of the Federal Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Lourie, held that under the America Invents Act a patent reference gets the prior-art date of its provisional application only if that provisional provides written-description support for at least one of the reference's claims. The court rejected the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's contrary rule and vacated its decision. Here's the brief.

Dental Monitoring owns the ’409 patent, directed to a method of acquiring and analyzing images of a patient's dental arch using a deep-learning device. Align petitioned for inter partes review, and the Board held the challenged claims obvious over a combination of three references, one of them a published application called Carrier.

The timing mattered. The ’409 patent's effective filing date fell between the filing of Carrier's provisional application and the filing of Carrier's non-provisional application. So Carrier was prior art only if it received the date of its provisional.

Dental Monitoring argued that under the Federal Circuit's 2015 decision in Dynamic Drinkware, a reference gets its provisional's date only if the provisional supports at least one of the reference's claims. The Board disagreed. Relying on its own precedential Penumbra decision, it held that Dynamic Drinkware governs only pre-AIA law. Under the AIA, the Board said, a reference need only satisfy the ministerial requirements for claiming priority, with a provisional that describes the subject matter relied on. Dental Monitoring appealed.

The question was one of statutory interpretation: what section 102(d)(2) requires before a reference may claim an earlier prior-art date.

Section 119(e)(1), in turn, entitles an application to a provisional's date only if the invention is disclosed in the provisional in the manner provided by section 112(a).

The court held that the plain text resolves the dispute.

Section 102(d) incorporates that substantive requirement, the court reasoned, and nothing in its text creates a lesser, ministerial standard for prior-art purposes. The words "entitled to claim a right of priority" refer to substantive entitlement, not the procedural act of claiming priority. Reading them otherwise would render "entitled to" superfluous.

The court rejected both of Align's arguments. Dynamic Drinkware had expressly reserved the question of newly designated section 102(d); it did not decide that the AIA abandoned the written-description requirement.

And the AIA's separate definition of a claimed invention's effective filing date, in section 100(i), does not answer what "entitled" means in section 102(d). The court gave no weight to floor statements describing the requirement as ministerial, because the statutory text is clear.

The Board had not decided whether Carrier's provisional supported any Carrier claim, so the court remanded for that finding. It noted that it had affirmed Penumbra only by a Rule 36 judgment, which carries no precedential value.

Dental Monitoring holds that Dynamic Drinkware's rule survives the America Invents Act. A patent or published application is prior art as of its provisional's filing date only if the provisional provides section 112(a) support for at least one of the reference's claims. The decision displaces the Board's Penumbra approach and grounds the rule in the text of sections 102(d)(2) and 119(e)(1).

Dental Monitoring SAS v. Align Technology, Inc., No. 2025-1752, decided August 10th, 2026. I'm Kyle Coleman. Thanks for watching.