J&J, the world’s largest health-products company, asked for an order barring Boston Scientific’s infringement and for unspecified damages, Jan. 15 in a lawsuit in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware. The Promus stent competes with J&J’s Cypher product.
Boston Scientific’s “infringing sales have reduced Cordis’s Cypher stent sales and caused irreparable harm to Cordis,” J&J said in the lawsuit.
Boston Scientific said it will vigorously defend itself.
“We dispute these allegations and believe they are without merit,” spokesman Paul Donovan said.
Boston Scientific agreed in September to pay $716.3 million to Cordis to end some litigation over heart devices. That accord ended more than a dozen lawsuits between the two companies.
Boston Scientific, based in Natick, Massachusetts, and New Brunswick, New Jersey-based J&J have been suing each other since 1997 over technology related to cardiac stents, tiny mesh tubes that prop open heart arteries after they’ve been cleared of fat.
Patent litigation over stents has gone on for more than a decade, with the top makers of the devices each claiming the other is using proprietary technology for the basic structure of the products, the drugs that coat them to prevent the growth of scar tissue, or the systems used to put them in the arteries.
Trial Next Month
The companies will face each other in court next month for a hearing on damages after an appeals court last year said Boston Scientific infringed two patents owned by J&J’s Cordis, while Cordis violated a patent owned by Boston Scientific. The trial is scheduled to start Feb. 1 in Wilmington.
J&J rose 67 cents to $65.23 at 3:20 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. Boston Scientific rose 7 cents to $9.50.
The case is Cordis Corp. v. Boston Scientific Corp., 10cv39, U.S. District Court for Delaware (Wilmington).
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