Smith & Nephew (NYSE:SNN) chalked up a $85 million win against Arthrex Inc. today, following a $4.7 million loss on Monday.
The jury in the U.S. District Court in Oregon found that Arthrex was guilty of patent infringement for the Naples, Fla.-based company’s SutureTak, PushLock and Bio-PushLock anchors used in shoulder repair.
This is the dispute’s third round. A jury granted SNN almost $20.5 million in June 2008, finding that Arthrex willfully infringed on SNN patents. A court of appeals overturned the decision in November 2009 and sent the case back to trial with a new interpretation of the terms of the patent.
This latest win comes of the heels of a SNN loss on a different patent dispute with Arthrex concerning a knee ligament reattachment patent.
That dispute began in 2007, when SNN sued Arthrex in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas, accusing it of violating patents covering techniques for attaching anterior cruciate ligament grafts to bone.
A February 2010 decision went against Arthrex to the tune of $4.7 million, after the jury found that its RetroBut-ton femoral fixation device infringed the remaining patent covering Smith & Nephew’s EndoButton fixation device. The jury later added nearly $473,000 in pre-judgment interest, according to court documents.
The decision was overturned on Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, which said that SNN “presented insufficient evidence at trial to support a finding that the RetroBut- ton device infringed Claim 8 of U.S. Patent No. 5,645,588 (’588 patent).”