W.L. Gore & Assoc. may have won some ground in a feud with C.R. Bard (NYSE:BCR) after the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office granted Gore’s request for a re-examination of Bard’s vascular graft patents.
Bard announced in regulatory filings that the USPTO had agreed to Gore’s "previously filed" request for review, a move that Bard doesn’t expect will impact the ongoing lawsuit between the companies, according to the report.
The 2 device makers have been locked in a patent infringement battle for years, pushing their dispute all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately refused to hear the case.
The lawsuit’s history dates back to 1974 when Bard originally filed its patent for the grafts, devices used to bypass or reinforce blood vessels. The patent sat ungranted for 28 years while the companies debated who was the 1st to invent the device.
Bard is in the process of attempting to compel payment after a U.S. federal judge upheld a prior win against Gore, affirming that Gore engineers had no inventor claims on the patent. Gore has already set aside nearly $890 million to cover the case, according to Bard regulatory filings from June 2012.