A Medtronic EBU guiding catheter
Medtronic Inc. (NYSE:MDT) is exploring its options regarding a patent infringement loss decided by a jury this week.
An Oklahoma jury ordered Medtronic to pay $9.9 million in back royalties for willfully infringing on a guidance catheter patent owned by Dr. Jan Voda.
"We respectfully disagree with the jury verdict and continue to maintain that our guide catheters do not infringe the Voda patent asserted in this district court case," Medtronic spokeswoman Wendy Dougherty told MassDevice via email. "We are exploring all of our currently available options, which include appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit."
Voda invented new guiding catheters for delivering balloon devices and stents in the early 1990s and won patents in 2000, according to court documents.
Medtronic’s EBU guiding catheters, Voda argued, infringe existing patents. The Fridley, Minn.-based med-tech titan continued to sell and promote the EBU line after Voda informed them of the infringement, according to the documents.
A jury in the U.S. District Court for Western Oklahoma ruled that Voda’s patents are valid Medtronic and Medtronic Vascular’s infringement was willful.
Medtronic is not the only med-tech titan Voda’s sued for infringement, according to court documents. In 2003, he successfully sued Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) subsidiary Cordis Corp. for infringement of the same guiding catheter patents. Voda won again when Cordis took the case to the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit.
Read more medical device legal news from MassDevice.com
Convicted former McKesson chairman asks Supreme Court to overturn guilty verdict
Former McKesson Corp. (NYSE:MCK) chairman Charles McCall, convicted of securities fraud in 2009, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the verdict against him. A lower court judge inappropriately asked the jury to consider whether he "recklessly disregarded" warnings of accounting misdeeds at the company, McCall argued.
McCall was convicted in federal court of 5 counts of securities fraud and circumventing accounting rules in a scheme that cost investors $8.6 billion dollars in the late 1990s. He and McKesson general counsel Jay Lapine were accused of hiding backdated sales contracts from auditors, as well as other activities that artificially inflated the company’s revenue figures, Bloomberg reported.
McCall was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison and fined $1 million.
The recent moves follow McCall’s failed attempts to get his verdict overturned through the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Read more
