BMJ Publishing Petitions for Review of Three Evidium Medical Evidence Translation Patents.

The parties and the patents

The proceedings are BMJ Publishing Group Limited v. Evidium, Inc., IPR2027-00023 (U.S. Patent No. 11,869,674), PGR2027-00001 (U.S. Patent No. 12,518,882), and PGR2027-00002 (U.S. Patent No. 12,518,883). BMJ Publishing Group Limited is the petitioner, and each petition identifies it, as a company wholly owned by the British Medical Association, as the real party in interest. Evidium, Inc. is the patent owner. Each patent is titled Translation of Medical Evidence into Computational Evidence and Applications Thereof, and the petitions give April 15, 2022 as the earliest claimed priority date. The '674 patent issued on January 9, 2024; the '882 and '883 patents issued on January 6, 2026.

What the claims cover

Claim 1 of the '674 patent recites a method of translating medical evidence into computational elements: processing electronic text about a medical condition with natural language processing to produce diagnostic factors, displaying them to a person who supplies a factor group and a rank, and storing the condition, the group, and each factor as separate linked database entries, with the factor entries holding no information specific to the condition. Claim 1 of the '882 patent recites a computer system that receives text from several medical evidence sources, including a published journal, that arrange diagnostic factors and conditions in different hierarchies, creates a graph database cross-linking them, and provides APIs that let an application use the linked entries to generate a healthcare determination. Claim 1 of the '883 patent recites a method of answering a medical query received through an API by traversing ancestor-descendant relationships in a knowledge graph of condition, finding, and investigation nodes linked to SNOMED-CT or LOINC, and returning the relevant nodes to the software application.

The IPR petition

IPR2027-00023 challenges claims 1 to 9 and 11 to 30 of the '674 patent on nine obviousness grounds under 35 U.S.C. 103 built on Datla, Dang, Goldberg, Kim, Van Assel, and Zhong. Ground 1 targets claims 1 to 3, 7 to 9, and 11 to 15 over Datla, Dang, and Goldberg. The petition relies on a technical expert's declaration. Because the '674 patent issued more than nine months before the filing, post-grant review was not available for it; 35 U.S.C. 321(c) limits a PGR petition to the nine months after a patent issues. The petition states that it was filed within one year of service of Evidium's complaint, which it gives as June 8, 2026.

The PGR petitions

PGR2027-00001 challenges claims 1 to 9 and 11 to 41 of the '882 patent on 13 grounds: 11 obviousness grounds built on Datla, Goldberg, Gnanasambandam, Dang, MacRae, Kim, Van Assel, and Zhong (Ground 1 targets claims 1 to 3, 8 to 9, and 11 to 14 over Datla, Goldberg, and Gnanasambandam), a written-description ground under 35 U.S.C. 112 against claims 21 to 41, and a section 101 ground against all challenged claims. PGR2027-00002 challenges all 34 claims of the '883 patent on three grounds: obviousness of claims 1 to 14 and 17 to 34 over Goldberg, Gnanasambandam, and Dang; obviousness of claims 15 and 16 over those references plus Datla; and unpatentability of claims 1 to 34 under 35 U.S.C. 101. Both PGR petitions were filed on October 5, 2026, within nine months of the patents' January 6, 2026 issue date, and the Board accorded each that filing date in notices mailed October 14, 2026.

The district court case

The petitions list Evidium, Inc. v. BMJ Publishing Group Limited, No. 4:26-cv-05050 (N.D. Cal.), as related litigation involving the challenged patents and related patents. Evidium filed the complaint on May 28, 2026 and an amended complaint on September 3, 2026, according to the court docket. Each petition cross-references the other two proceedings.

What to watch next

In both PGRs, the October 14, 2026 notices set Evidium's deadline for any brief requesting discretionary denial at two months from the notice, December 14, 2026, under the USPTO's interim Director discretionary process, and for any preliminary response at three months from the notice, January 14, 2027, consistent with 37 CFR 42.207(b). In the IPR, watch for the Board's notice according a filing date; under 37 CFR 42.107(b) a preliminary response is due three months after that notice, and under the interim process a discretionary denial brief is due two months after it. Institution decisions follow those briefs. Any of the proceedings can also end early, including by settlement.