Another chapter in the war over cardiac stent patents came to a close on Wednesday, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a summary judgment that dismissed an infringement suit brought by Johnson & Johnson and Wyeth LLC and invalidated the patents at issue.
J&J has a license for two Wyeth patents that relate to methods of delivering the drug sirolimus. The companies filed suit in January 2008, claiming that the patents were infringed by stents sold by Boston Scientific Corporation, Abbott Laboratories, and Medtronic Inc. U.S. district judge Joel Pisano in Trenton granted summary judgment to the defendants in January 2012 and invalidated the two patents. He agreed with the defendants that the inventors at Wyeth had never actually tested a drug delivery method they sought to patent, and therefore violated the "written description" requirement for patentability.
