Dr. Bruce Saffran, fresh from a $500 million court victory and a private settlement with Boston Scientific over a drug-eluting stent patent, is suing Abbott Laboratories (PDF) for violating the same patent with its Xience V stent.
Saffran, a New Jersey radiologist, won the half-billion-dollar verdict against the Natick, Mass.-based devices giant and later settled for an undisclosed amount (although BoSci later posted a $50 million charge on the deal).
Now, in a suit filed in U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas, Saffran is accusing Chicago-based Abbott of violating the same patent.
And Boston Scientific made news on another front in its patent war, after a Delaware judge threw out its lawsuit against Wall Cardiovascular Technologies and its half-owner, Cardio Holdings LLC.
Judge Susan Robinson dismissed the Delaware case, writing that her court lacks jurisdiction over the matter, which is also the subject of earlier lawsuits in Texas.
In 2007, Wall Cardiovascular sued Boston Scientific, Johnson & Johnson (and added Medtronic into the mix in 2008) for infringing a patent invented by W. Henry Wall. Wall Cardiovascular also sued Abbott over the same patent in 2008.
In response, BoSci moved to have the court rule for non-infringement, invalidity and unenforceability of the patent — and filed a suit on the same grounds in the Delaware court.
But Robinson, finding that the links to Delaware are tenuous and that the same issues are being argued in the Texas case filed by Boston Scientific, granted Wall Cardiovascular’s motion to dismiss.
Robinson is no stranger to the stent wars. Earlier this month, she apologized to both parties and the federal bench in overturning a prior, erroneous ruling that a pair of Johnson & Johnson unit Cordis Corp.’s stent patents were unenforceable.
Her 2002 decision in Cordis Corp. v. Boston Scientific Corp. et al. was wrong, she wrote in her reversal of the opinion, setting the stage for yet another round in the more than 10-year-old case.
“I note in this regard, with deep regret, that this matter ended up buried among the multitude of matters (and the tens of thousands of pages of motions, briefs and appendices) filed by the parties associated with just the various stent cases on my docket, not to mention the papers filed in the dozens of other patent cases on my docket. My sincere apologies to the Federal Circuit and to the parties,” Robinson wrote.
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