Federal Circuit Wipes Out $9.1 Million Fee Award Against ChromaDex
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has reversed an order requiring ChromaDex to pay $9.1 million of its rival Elysium Health's legal fees. In a nonprecedential opinion issued on 30 October 2026 (No. 25-1227), Circuit Judge Chen, writing for a panel that also included Judges Prost and Stoll, found that the Delaware district court misjudged how weak ChromaDex's position had been.
A patent lost, then a bill
ChromaDex and the Trustees of Dartmouth College sued Elysium in 2018 over two patents on dietary supplements containing isolated nicotinamide riboside (NR), a form of vitamin B3. The claims cover oral compositions that combine isolated NR with certain other ingredients and a carrier and that raise NAD+ levels in the body.
NR occurs naturally in cow's milk, but only in trace amounts bound to whey protein, so it does no useful work there. The district court nevertheless held that the asserted claims were directed to a product of nature and therefore ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The Federal Circuit affirmed that ruling in 2023.
Elysium then sought fees under 35 U.S.C. § 285, which allows an award in "exceptional" cases. It argued that ChromaDex never had a credible answer to the Supreme Court's 2013 Myriad decision, which held that isolating a natural DNA sequence does not make it patentable. Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly agreed that Myriad decided the question and awarded $9.1 million.
Why the panel disagreed
The appeals court said Myriad was only part of the picture. If ChromaDex had argued nothing more than that isolation separated NR from milk, that argument would have looked a lot like the one that failed in Myriad. Its main theory went further, though. Relying on the court's 2019 Natural Alternatives decision, which upheld claims to beta-alanine supplements, ChromaDex argued that its isolated NR has markedly different characteristics and significant utility because it can raise NAD+ in a way the natural form cannot. An expert report supported that argument.
Rejecting that theory in 2023 required the court to work through several issues that Myriad did not address. These included the fact that the claims set no minimum quantity of NR, that the construction of "isolated" did not require the NR to be freed from the whey protein, and that the NAD+ boost from milk comes from tryptophan rather than from NR. That analysis, the panel said, shows the case was not "open and shut". A losing argument is not the same as an exceptionally meritless one. Because the trial court treated Myriad as dispositive, it abused its discretion.
The panel also declined Elysium's request to send the matter back for a fresh look. It found that neither the district court's reasoning nor the record Elysium had built could support an exceptionality finding, and it warned that fee disputes should not turn into a second major lawsuit. Costs on appeal went to ChromaDex.
Why it matters
Section 101 challenges often end cases early, and winning defendants increasingly follow up with fee motions. This ruling, though nonprecedential, draws a clear line. Courts must judge the substantive strength of the patentee's eligibility arguments as they actually were, not through the lens of the final result. Where the law needed real analysis beyond a single Supreme Court decision, a fee award is hard to sustain.
For life sciences companies that build products around naturally occurring compounds, the takeaway is two-sided. Claims to isolated natural substances remain vulnerable under § 101 in the US. But a well-reasoned eligibility position backed by evidence should not expose a patentee to a large fee award just because it lost.
An Indonesian angle
Indonesia's Patent Law (Law No. 13 of 2016, most recently amended by Law No. 65 of 2024) excludes discoveries of what already exists in nature from patentable inventions, so the patentability of isolated natural compounds is also a live question for supplement and herbal medicine applicants here. Indonesia has no direct equivalent of the US fee-shifting rule in § 285. Even so, the US case is a reminder for local applicants to draft claims around concrete technical features, such as dosage, formulation or purity, rather than the natural substance alone.
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