A federal judge has dismissed a patent infringement suit brought by Teva Pharmaceuticals after finding that its claims of infringing product formulations in the cholesterol drug Crestor were “conceived of and reduced to practice” by AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals prior to Teva’s patent.
The decision by U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn Jr. in Teva v. AstraZeneca was premised on the century-old axiom in patent law that “a product which would literally infringe if later in time anticipates if earlier.”
