Legal News

Stenting Down: Device Makers Reach $400 Million Patent Settlement

By Ashby Jones

If we had a dollar for every piece of paper ever filed in patent fights over heart stents, we wouldn’t be here. No, we’d be dictating the Law Blog this morning to a trusty man-typist while sipping a mimosa from a castle overlooking the Mediterranean. Nor would we be clad in this itchy standard-issue terrycloth Law Blogger robe. No, we’d be wearing one woven wholly from the finest silks in the Caucasus.

Yes, it’s true, a lot of money has been spent through the years battling ownership rights over heart stents, tiny devices used to keep open arteries. Billions, in fact.

But a big battle in the heart-stent war seems to be coming to an end. Medtronic will pay rival Abbott Laboratories $400 million to settle all patent fights between the companies and clear the air regarding artery-opening heart stents, nearly completing Medtronic’s effort to clear these cases from its dockets. The settlements prevent the companies from suing each other over heart stents or delivery systems for at least 10 years. Click here for the Dow Jones Newswires story.

The new agreement follows deals Medtronic reached earlier this year to resolve stent-patent disputes with both Boston Scientific and Johnson & Johnson, its other two big stent rivals.

Medtronic said it has now resolved or settled “substantially all” intellectual property litigation regarding the design and delivery of stents, including bare-metal and medicated versions.

“As a result, Medtronic will now focus more resources on efforts to improve health care for patients with vascular disease,” the company said in a statement.

According to the American Lawyer’s Andrew Longstreth, citing the NYT, that from 1994-2007, about $24 billion worth of stents had been sold in the U.S. since 1994, and that “pretty much every dollar” was tied up in court cases. Click here, also, for a story from Bloomberg, which says the battles between Medtronic and Abbott stretched all over the world, from California to the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Japan.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 28, 2009 (boomark / email).