Kimberly-Clark Petitions for Post-Grant Review of Eighteen Claims of a Procter & Gamble Abaca Tissue Patent.

The parties and the patent

The proceeding is Kimberly-Clark Corporation v. The Procter & Gamble Company, PGR2026-00078. Kimberly-Clark Corporation is the petitioner. The petition names The Procter & Gamble Company as the patent owner. The petition identifies Kimberly-Clark Corporation as the real party in interest and states that there are no related proceedings. U.S. Patent 12,516,475 is titled Soft Sanitary Tissue Products Comprising Non-Wood Fibers and issued January 6, 2026, from an application filed April 6, 2023 that claims priority to provisional applications filed from April 8, 2022 to March 31, 2023.

What the claims cover

Claim 1 covers a two-ply sanitary tissue product comprising at least about 5% to about 100% by weight non-wood fibers selected from the group consisting of bamboo, abaca, and mixtures thereof. At least one ply is a multi-layered fibrous structure in which every layer contains at least about 5% by weight of the non-wood fibers, and the product exhibits a TS7 of less than about 14 dB V2 rms. Independent claims 9, 15, and 23 recite the same group of non-wood fibers. The petition challenges those four independent claims and the dependent claims that do not narrow the fibers to bamboo, eighteen claims in all. The patent's other ten claims, independent claims 5 and 19 with their dependents and dependent claims 2 and 16, are limited to bamboo fibers.

The grounds

The petition raises two grounds, each against claims 1, 3, 4, 9 to 15, 17, 18, and 23 to 28 under 35 U.S.C. 112(a). The first is that the claims lack written description support. The second is that the specification does not enable them. On both grounds, the petition contends that the specification does not describe or enable a tissue product with abaca in every layer of a multi-layered ply that meets the claimed TS7 or TS750 acoustic softness limits, and it relies on a technical expert's declaration. A post-grant review may cancel claims on any ground of invalidity under 35 U.S.C. 282(b)(2) or (3), including section 112, 35 U.S.C. 321(b), and a petition must be filed within nine months after the patent issues, 35 U.S.C. 321(c). The '475 patent issued January 6, 2026, and the petition was filed October 5, 2026. Post-grant review is available only for patents subject to the AIA's first-inventor-to-file provisions, Leahy-Smith America Invents Act sec. 6(f)(2)(A), which reach any patent that contains or contained at any time a claim with an effective filing date on or after March 16, 2013, AIA sec. 3(n)(1). The earliest priority date the '475 patent claims is April 8, 2022.

What to watch next

Under 37 CFR 42.207(b), Procter & Gamble may file a preliminary response within three months of the notice according the petition a filing date. Under the USPTO's interim Director discretionary process, any discretionary denial brief from Procter & Gamble is due within two months of that notice. Watch for the notice, those filings, and the institution decision.