A Medical Device Daily

Angiotech Pharmaceuticals, reported that it reached an agreement with Johnson & Johnson’s (New Brunswick, New Jersey) subsidiary, Conor Medsystems (Menlo Park, California) to settle all outstanding patent litigation with respect to Conor’s CoStar paclitaxel stent.

“With this agreement now in place, Angiotech expects that the resources required to defend and enforce our intellectual property should decrease,” said Dr. William Hunter, president/CEO of Angiotech.

The dispute centered on Angiotech’s patents for the cancer drug paclitaxel to coat stents.

Last week the company said it received a favorable decision from the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand regarding the patent litigation (Medical Device Daily, Sept. 14, 2007).

In March the company reported a favorable decision regarding its Hunter patent from the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich, Germany (MDD, March 16, 2007).

Angiotech said that the EPO’s Technical Board of Appeal rejected the attempt by Conor Medsystems and Sahajanand Medical Technologies (Surat, India) to intervene and appeal an earlier decision by the Opposition Division of the EPO, which upheld the Hunter patent. Angiotech said that the decision found that these appeals were “inadmissible.”

The Hunter patent also covers claims to stents coated with a composition of paclitaxel and a polymeric carrier.

But not all international rulings regarding Angiotech’s patent have been favorable to the company.

In January a UK appeals court upheld an earlier decision by the UK High Court of Justice to revoke the UK portion of European Patent (EP) 0 706 376 B1 to Angiotech. The patent is exclusively licensed to Boston Scientific (Natick, Massachusetts) (MDD, Jan. 17, 2007).

In February 2005, Conor Medsystems initiated proceedings against Angiotech and the University of British Columbia (Vancouver) in the High Court of Justice in the UK, requesting that the court invalidate the patent on the grounds that all claims of the patent either lack novelty or are obvious in light of the state of scientific knowledge at the priority date of the patent.

A year later the High Court of Justice rendered its decision, agreeing with those arguments, and on May 31, 2006, Angiotech appealed the decision.

Angiotech develops treatment solutions for diseases or complications associated with medical device implants, surgical interventions and acute injury.

In other patent news: StemCells, (Palo Alto, California) reported it will begin patent-reexamination with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) following the agency’s decision, which was expected, to preliminarily reject all claims in the company’s four patents which are the subject of its lawsuit against Neuralstem (Rockville, Maryland).

In June, StemCells said the four patents were pending reexamination petitions from Neuralstem.

The company also noted the PTO often initially rejects reexamined patents, but then subsequently upholds patent claims in later stages of the review and appeals process. StemCells noted that only one of the more than 130 claims in the four patents needs to survive in order for the litigation to continue.