BORNHEIM, Germany MorphoSys AG, of Martinsried, Germany, confirmed that Cambridge Antibody Technology Ltd. (CAT), of Melbourn, UK, together with the Medical Research Council, of London, and the Scripps Research Institute, of San Diego, initiated a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California in San Diego alleging infringement of their ¿Winter II¿ U.S. patent. The Winter II patent covers certain antibody expression libraries and methods of generating such libraries and was granted in the U.S. on June 19, 2001 (U.S. Patent No. 6,248,516), MorphoSys said.

In Europe, the European Patent Office (EPO) granted a related Winter II patent to CAT in 1994, which MorphoSys opposed successfully, MorphoSys spokeswoman Lisa Richert told Bioworld International. Concerning the same patent, CAT took MorphoSys to the Munich District Court in 1998, a case that is on hold until a final EPO decision. In 1999, EPO requested substantial changes in the language of the key claim in the patent, thereby significantly narrowing the scope of protection. The case is ongoing, since CAT filed an opposition, Richert said.

She added that the dispute on the Winter II patent is one of three lawsuits currently ongoing between MorphoSys and CAT.

In U.S. District Court in Washington, MorphoSys filed for a declaratory judgment stating that MorphoSys does not infringe CAT¿s U.S. Patent No. 5,885,793 (the ¿Griffiths¿ patent). CAT failed to obtain an infringement verdict from the jury in March, Richert said, adding that now both parties are expecting the judge¿s decision. The third dispute relates to the ¿McCafferty¿ patent (EP 0589 877) in Europe. CAT took MorphoSys to the Munich District Court, which stopped the complaint until the EPO¿s final decision.