The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated and remanded a preliminary injunction (PI), finding that the district court improperly construed a claim term based on references cited in a provisional application but omitted from the asserted patents. FMC Corp. v. Sharda USA, LLC, Case No. 224-2335 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 21, 2025) (Moore, Chen, Barnett, JJ.)

FMC owns two patents claiming priority to a provisional application concerning insecticides and miticides compositions. The patents specifically cover formulations comprising bifenthrin and a cyano-pyrethroid. Sharda currently markets an insecticide product known as Winner, which contains both bifenthrin and a cyano-pyrethroid.

FMC sued Sharda for patent infringement on its two patents and sought a temporary restraining order (TRO) and a PI. The district court denied both motions but issued a claim construction for the term “composition.” Instead of applying the term’s plain and ordinary meaning, the district court interpreted “composition” narrowly to mean “stable compositions, rather than the well-known unstable compositions that produce ineffective results as discussed throughout the prosecution history.” In reaching this construction, the district court relied on statements made in the provisional application and disclosures found in a separate, non-asserted FMC patent that claimed priority to the same provisional application. However, these disclosures were absent from the asserted patents themselves, appearing only in the provisional application and the non-asserted patent.

FMC renewed its motion for a TRO, which the district court granted and later converted into a PI. In issuing the PI, the district court again relied on its narrow construction of the term “composition” as a key point in rejecting Sharda’s invalidity defenses. Sharda appealed.

Sharda argued that the district court erred in both its construction of “composition” and its determination that Sharda failed to raise a substantial question regarding the patents’ validity. The Federal Circuit first addressed Sharda’s challenge to the district court’s construction of the term “composition,” which had been limited to stable compositions based on disclosures in the provisional application and a non-asserted patent. The Court acknowledged that while the provisional application contained multiple references to “stability,” all such references were deliberately removed from the common specification of the two asserted patents. As a result, the specifications of the asserted patents did not simply carry forward the language of the provisional application but instead reflected a substantive evolution.

Citing its 2024 decision in DDR Holdings, LLC v. Priceline.com LLC, the Federal Circuit emphasized that such omissions are legally significant. The Court concluded that a person of ordinary skill in the art, considering the deliberate removal of all references to stability, would not interpret the term “composition” as limited to stable formulations. Because FMC chose to revise the asserted patents’ written descriptions to exclude any mention of stability, the district court erred in importing a stability limitation from the provisional application and non-asserted patent into the claims. Accordingly, the Federal Circuit held that the district court improperly grafted a “stability” requirement onto the term “composition.”

The Federal Circuit also found fault with the district court’s [...]

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