Hospira patent dispute revived

A US appeals court has revived a dispute in which a lower court previously ruled that there should not be a trial to determine whether pharmaceutical company Hospira infringed three patents.

In a 3-0 verdict, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said that there was a “ genuine dispute” over whether three patents owned by Ivera Medical were in fact obvious.

The three patents cover a medical cap used to disinfect catheters and luer ports after use. The cap contains a vent to help clean the devices.

Last year, the US District Court for the Southern District of California refused to hear a trial to determine whether Hospira infringed the patents after ruling that the “arrangement of elements in the asserted claims do not yield anything other than predictable results”.

Ivera Medical then appealed against the decision at the federal circuit.

But, in a ruling handed down on September 8, the federal circuit disagreed with the district court and said that the dispute over whether the patented invention was obvious needed to be decided at a trial.

“We hold that Ivera established a genuine dispute over whether one of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to add a vent to the disinfecting cap,” Judge Jimmie Reyna wrote in the ruling.

The case has been remanded back to the district court.

Both Ivera Medical and Hospira have since been bought.

In March, Ivera Medical was acquired by manufacturing company 3M, and last month the US Federal Trade Commission cleared the way for Pfizer’s $17 billion acquisition of Hospira.