Kite says $1.2 billion Juno award will ‘kill innovation’

Gilead Sciences division Kite Pharma wants a federal appeals court to reverse a $1.2 billion patent award in favour of Juno Pharmaceuticals and a cancer research institute.

In a brief filed on August 31 at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Kite argued that the award was “astronomical” and threatened to “kill innovation”.

The dispute concerns Kite’s Yescarta (axicabtagene ciloleucel), a CAR-T cell therapy used to treat large B-cell lymphoma.

In April, the US District Court for the Central District of California awarded $1.2 billion to Juno and the Sloan Kettering Institute, after a jury found that Yescarta infringed their patent.

The court also ordered Kite to pay an ongoing royalty of 27.6% on sales of Yescarta through the expiration of the infringed patents.

In its Federal Circuit appeal, Kite denied that it infringed the patent, which it said should be invalidated for overclaiming.

According to Kite, the patent claims are so broad that they “preempt an entire field of inquiry”—a field which has “all the predictability of a lottery ticket”.

“Juno tested a billion candidates to identify a tiny subset that might perform the narrowest claims’ function, through pure trial and error. In short, the patent claims a research plan. This court has repeatedly struck claims like these for lack of written description and enablement,” the Kite brief said.

Kite also denies that the supposedly overbroad claims cover Yescarta. The Gilead subsidiary argues that Sloan Kettering and Juno amended the patent four years after it was issued.

In doing so, Kite says, they “stretched the patent’s scope just enough to capture Yescarta,” which had been publicly under development.

“Such a scope-broadening amendment is forbidden unless it represents a clearly evident correction to a clearly evident error. But if there was an error, it was not evident to the public,” Kite said in its appeal.

The Gilead division also argued that the $1.2 billion award was disproportionate, and that “Juno’s expert flouted every basic requirement of damages calculations”.

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