Patent Baristas

Earlier, Eli Lilly and Company lost a jury trial in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts in the case of Ariad Pharmaceuticals et al. v. Eli Lilly and Company. The jury awarded the plaintiffs approximately $65 million in back royalties and a 2.3 percent royalty on future U.S. sales of Evista and Xigris until the […]

In Apotex v. Pfizer (Sup. Ct. 05-1006), the Supreme Court said that it will not hear a case brought by generic pharmaceutical company Apotex that was trying to have Pfizer’s Zoloft patent invalidated. Zoloft (sertraline hydrochloride) is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) used to treat depression. Earlier, Pfizer sent Apotex an unconditional covenant not […]

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case asking whether companies can sue to invalidate another’s patent even when they don’t face an infringement suit, a case that may affect thousands of drug and biotechnology inventions. The case, MedImmune, Inc. v. Genentech, Inc. et al. (No. 05-608), looks at whether a company must stop […]

If you’ve ever worked with university inventors, you know that the pressure to publish is intense. Sometimes, that drive to publish comes back to bite you. An invention can only be protected by patent if it is novel (that is, no prior publication of the invention has been made by the inventor or others). While […]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you do research you must keep meticulous notes of the inventive process. Laboratory notebooks often play an important role during the patent prosecution process and even after a patent has issued. A properly kept notebook is invaluable in cases in which another party claims a […]

In a follow-up to my discussion on the Alza case, it is important to note that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review an appeal of a key patent case that could set a standard for when an invention is obvious. The Court has taken up the appeal by KSR International Inc., a Canadian manufacturer […]

Alza Corp. appealed a district court’s finding of noninfringement and invalidity of claims 1-3, 11, 13 and 14 of U.S. Patent No. 6,124,355 for a generic version of the once-a-day extended release formulation of the anti-incontinence drug oxybutynin, which Alza has been marketing as Ditropan XL®. Alza had sued after Mylan and Impax filed ANDAs […]

A jury unanimously found that Abbott Laboratories willfully infringed Innogenetics’ U.S. Patent No. 5,846,704, which covers a method of genotyping the Hepatitis C Virus (“HCV”) using probes targeting sequences from the 5′ untranslated region of HCV. Hepatitis C viruses (HCV) are a family of positive-stranded, enveloped RNA viruses causing the majority of non-A, non-B (NANB) […]