9 April 2015Americas

Hedge fund manager targets Jazz in another IPR patent challenge

A US hedge fund manager and a company he created has taken aim at Jazz Pharmaceuticals in an inter partes review patent challenge, marking the third time he has challenged a company’s patents.

On Tuesday (April 7), the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that Kyle Bass had filed a petition to invalidate a patent covering Jazz’s narcolepsy drug Xyrem (sodium oxybate), the company’s best-selling medicine.

A source told the newspaper that Bass, head of Hayman Capital Management, had been targetting companies whose patents he believed to be “spurious” and investing in companies that would profit if those patents were struck down.

Bass has not responded to a request for comment.

Jazz is the third pharmaceutical company to have patents targeted by Bass and his organisation the Coalition for Affordable Drugs, which is named as the lead petitioner in the challenge.

Bass is challenging patents that he thinks have “little value other than to drive up prescription drug prices,” the newspaper said.

His first petition was filed in February with a request to invalidate a patent protecting Acorda Therapeutics’s Ampyra (dalfampridine), a treatment to help multiple sclerosis patients, which was issued last March.

Last week, he also challenged patents covering two drugs by Dublin-based Shire.

His challenges have all come in the form of inter partes reviews, trial proceedings that petitioners can file before the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board to dispute a patent’s validity.

The reviews were introduced as part of the America Invents Act.

Acorda’s chief executive Ron Cohen said in the WSJ that Congress, by introducing inter partes reviews, had inadvertently created a “mirror image problem of ‘reverse patent trolls’”, who use the system to invalidate patents.


More on this story

Americas
13 April 2015   Dallas-based hedge fund Hayman Capital Management has defended its owner’s decision to challenge a clutch of patents using the inter partes review procedure.

More on this story

Americas
13 April 2015   Dallas-based hedge fund Hayman Capital Management has defended its owner’s decision to challenge a clutch of patents using the inter partes review procedure.