Bard lands injunction against blood clot powder rival CryoLife

A judge at the US District Court for the District of Delaware has issued a preliminary injunction against CryoLife, finding that the medical device maker’s PerClot Topical haemostatic powder infringes rival company C R Bard’s patent.

PerClot Topical is a starch-based powder that helps to clot blood in animals and is used to treat surgical wounds, cuts and nosebleeds.

Bard makes a product used for blood-clotting called Arista. Arista is also a powder made from plant-derived starch. Medical device maker Medafor, which was acquired by Bard in 2013, received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2006 to sell Arista.

In April last year, CryoLife asked the Delaware court for a declaratory judgment that its PerClot product did not infringe Bard’s US patent 6,060,461 and that the patent was invalid.

The patent, called “Topically applied clotting material”, covers a method for “enhancing the formulation of clots in a wound of an animal where blood is present”.

In the case, CryoLife challenged the construction of Bard’s patent claims. It argued that the written description of the ‘461 patent did not provide adequate support for the proposed construction of “porous particle”, which rendered the patent invalid.

CryoLife said that “porous particles”, as described in the patent, could be construed as “substantially spherical materials, for example, beads, comprising voids or channels open to the surface that are sufficient to act as a molecular sieve”.

In the case, Bard proposed a simpler meaning of the phrase: “Particles containing pores.”

Judge Sue Robinson found on Tuesday (March 10) that CryoLife’s proposed construction of Bard’s patent claims improperly imported additional limitations called “open to the surface” and “molecular sieve” into the description, and concluded that Bard’s constructions were consistent with the patent specification.

She granted a preliminary injunction against the sale of CryoLife.

Neither Bard nor CryoLife responded to a request for comment.