Posts Tagged: "district of delaware"

Patents covering an antibody are often claimed by the antibody’s function (the residues where it binds to the antigen) rather than its structure (amino-acid sequence). This tactic can successfully cast a very wide net of patent protection over potentially millions of different antibodies. In doing so, even if the patent holder’s own antibodies never make it out of the laboratory, the patents can nevertheless corner the market on intellectual property covering a new class of inhibitors. The risk of this strategy, however, is that extremely broad patent scope can simultaneously doom a patent’s validity for not being sufficiently enabled or lacking written description. As an example, a recent decision from the District of Delaware, MorphoSys AG v. Janssen Biotech, Inc., No. 16-221 (LPS) (Dkt. 471) (Jan. 25, 2019), invalidated broad antibody patents for not being sufficiently enabled, as well as coming near to invalidating the same patents for lacking written description. The case is important to the growing body of patents covering biologic drugs because it delineates more precisely when functionally-claimed antibody patents can survive enablement and written description challenges.

On January 10, the U.S. District of Delaware held that Actavis’ generic version of Orexo’s opioid dependency treatment infringed an Orexo patent. The patent-at-issue in this order was U.S. Patent No. 8940330, titled Abuse-Resistant Pharmaceutical Composition for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence. This non-appealable infringement judgment prevents Actavis from commercializing its generic opioid dependency treatment until Orexo’s patent rights expire in September 2032. The judgment covers all dosage levels of the Actavis generic product.

While the claims-in-suit had previously survived validity challenges in an inter partes review (IPR) proceeding at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and in a District of Delaware case, Aly credited additional testimony and evidence in this case with leading Judge Pallmeyer towards finding that the claimed advance was inherent to the invention in the prior art. “In IPR, there’s a limited record so there’s not a lot of testing to examine, and two tests were submitted in the Delaware case,” Aly said. While that could have been enough, he noted that, in the Fresenius Kabi case, multiple companies had done more than 20 tests, all of which showed that the claimed advances were inherent to the stable product.

The Federal Circuit issued a nonprecedential decision in Indivior Inc. v. Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, S.A., which vacated a preliminary injunction handed out by the District of New Jersey in a Hatch-Waxman patent infringement case brought by British pharmaceutical firm Indivior. The Federal Circuit panel majority concluded that the district court had abused its discretion in granting the injunction. The majority found that the ‘305 patent’s specification disparaged, and therefore disclaimed, the method of drying the films with the use of conventional methods which only dry the top of the film. Judge Pauline Newman authored a dissenting opinion in which she explained she would have found the district court’s preliminary injunction grant sustained on appeal. According to Judge Newman, the majority’s decision imported the drying limitation from the ‘514 patent claims into the ‘305 patent claims despite the fact that the ‘305 patent was amended specifically to remove this limitation.

A jury in the United Stated Federal District Court for the District of Delaware recently delivered a verdict awarding nearly $24 million dollars in reasonable royalty damages to plaintiffs Bio-Rad Laboratories and the University of Chicago. Along with finding that defendant 10x Genomics had infringed upon patents covering genetic analysis technologies, the jury also found that 10x Genomics’ infringement was willful and found it “highly unprobable” (i.e., the words of the jury verdict form) that the asserted patent claims were valid.

On Tuesday, September 4th, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision in Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. T-Mobile USA, Inc., et. al., vacating and remanding a grant of summary judgment entered by the district court finding the defendants in the case didn’t infringe a patent asserted by Intellectual Ventures. The Federal Circuit panel of Chief Judge Sharon Prost and Circuit Judges Kimberly Moore and Jimmie Reyna found that the district court had erred in its claim construction leading up to the grant of summary judgment in the case.

On July 27th, a jury verdict entered into the District of Delaware awarded $82.5 million in reasonable royalties to information technology giant IBM after that company asserted a series of patents against e-commerce marketplace provider Groupon. The jury determined that Groupon infringed on a series of four patents asserted by IBM.

On Monday, July 16th, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision in Blackbird Tech v. ELB Electronics, which vacated an earlier judgment of non-infringement of a patent asserted by Blackbird in the District of Delaware. The Federal Circuit majority panel of Chief Judge Sharon Prost and Circuit Judge Kimberly Moore determined that the district court had erred at construing the claim term “attachment surface” in finding non-infringement of the asserted claims. Circuit Judge Jimmie Reyna dissented in this case.

The sole question on appeal was whether it would have been obvious to make zolmitriptan into a nasal spray. The Federal Circuit agreed with the district court that the prior art taught away from formulating zolmitriptan for intranasal administration.

On Wednesday, June 27th, a pair of orders of dismissal, one entered in the District of Delaware and the other entered in the Northern District of California, marked the official end of the patent war which played out between consumer tech giants Apple and Samsung for the better part of the past decade. This legal dispute, which was brought to courts in 10 different countries and even went to the U.S. Supreme Court, is notable because it undermines the argument that major patent infringement battles harm tech consumers through added costs and blocking innovation.

Legal data analytics provider Lex Machina recently published a post featuring data points regarding the filing of patent infringement cases in the year following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods Group Brands. In that decision, the Court held that the patent venue statute (28 U.S.C. § 1400(b)) meant that domestic companies could only file patent infringement suits in the judicial district where they were incorporated. Lex Machina’s one-year data update shows that TC Heartland has toppled the Eastern District of Texas as the top forum for patent infringement filings among U.S. district courts. The decision has also affected the filing behaviors of high-volume plaintiffs (HVPs), or those entities filing 10 or more patent infringement cases in U.S. district courts within one calendar year.

Recently, Denmark-based footwear maker ECCO filed a suit alleging claims of patent infringement against Manhattan Beach, CA-based shoemaker Skechers. The suit, filed in the federal district for Delaware, asserts a series of patents owned by the Danish shoemaker which cover aspects of golf shoes which have been commercially successful for ECCO in recent years. According to ECCO’s complaint, the alleged claims of infringement by Skechers involve the particular cleat arrangement as well as the structure of the cleats used in the sole in the golf shoes, which are covered by ECCO’s patents.

In 2017, U.S. district courts saw a total of 417 patent infringement suits related to ANDA filings made by drugmakers with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seeking to bring generic versions of brand-name pharmaceuticals to the U.S. market. This total number of ANDA cases was below recent highs set in 2014 (437 cases) and 2015 (475 cases) but it was also a significant increase over the 324 ANDA cases filed in 2016. Going back to 2009, 2017 saw the third-highest number of ANDA cases in a single year. The fact that ANDA litigation is rising is pretty consistent with the number of ANDA applications being received by the FDA. In 2017, the FDA approved a record number of ANDAs with 763 such approvals that year; the agency attributed this uptick to an increased number of agency hires.

Patent owner MOAEC Technologies filed suits alleging claims of patent infringement in the District of Delaware against a series of music entertainment app providers including Spotify, SoundCloud and Deezer. The suits claim that music services offered by all three defendants infringe upon a patent covering a music library collection technology invented by the founder of MOAEC… MOAEC’s suits also include language in an apparent attempt to preempt any patent validity challenges under 35 U.S.C. § 101, the basic statute governing the patentability of inventions, under the Alice/Mayo framework.